New York City's Lost Cemeteries
New York City's Lost Cemeteries
Encountering human remains during construction poses a high risk to owners and contractors usually delaying the construction project by years and generating unforetold cost overruns. In American cities, this risk is especially high due to a complex history of multi-cultural colonialization, industrialization, and large-scale heterogeneous immigration, which has repetitively reshaped the composition and configuration of New World cities through their communities, institutions, and the subsurface. Both immigrants and rural workers formed rapidly morphing urban communities, which then created institutions such as churches, cemeteries, paupers graveyards. Subsequently, their decedents moved to more affluent neighbourhoods and to greater assimilation frequently abandoning their long-buried ancestors. Ultimately, many such burial locations disappeared from local maps, often with the originally interred bodies still in the ground. In New York City (NYC), more than 138 lost burial locations have been identified in just the borough of Manhattan. While their rediscovery provides both rich historical insight into the expansion and evolution of NYC, pre-construction identification of such sites is critical for future infrastructure installation on both private property and in what is now the public right of way (i.e., streets and sidewalks). This paper (1) outlines some strategies for identification, validation, and future automation of these processes using NYCs oldest Dutch community as a case history, and (2) posits the concept of a shared resource tool to prevent accidental excavation of human remains.
Debra Laefer; J. Almary; A. Rozhkov; M. Yeoh; F. Tyner; S. Tyazhelkov; E. O’Sullivan; D. Doherty
4th International Symposium on the Preservation of Monuments and Historic Sites
Heritage Sites and Urban Development
https://doi.org/10.53243/tc301-2026-49