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Washington Square Park in 1930
Washington Square Park was a potter's field from 1797 to 1826, and in early 2008, during a soil testing, four bodies were discovered (and left buried) there. In fact, there are still 20,000 (known) bodies down there. The tipster for the recent tombstone find, however, wondered if this tombstone could have been from the original land owner, and perhaps part of a "family cemetery from 200 years ago or more." Curbed notes that if WSP has a history of private cemetery usage that we don't know about, that could make things more mysterious. We say it'll only get more mysterious when the area starts smelling like onions, which we all know means GHOSTS.
While the Parks Department confirmed the new find, they didn't go in to much detail, only saying that "archaeologists and engineers are on the scene to make a preliminary report and nothing further is known at this time."
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Just in time for Halloween!
Meh, even the poltergeists got the big shove from NYU.
Thats the tombstone marking the death of Washington Sq Park before it was 'cleaned up' and 're-aligned' and made pretty for yuppies and NYU developers.
With the amount of smoke that may have drifted down there over the last 60 years, these may have been the happiest corpses in NY.
Chaa! You know with that much herb, SOMEONE is going get a pizza!
If I could travel back to one place and time in this city it would be WSP in 1840.
WOW! A tombstone found in a not lost cemetery.
WSP was a potters field in the early nineteenth century. One would expect turning up an occasional tombstone given the territory if one dug down. DUH?
Great resting place.
The land on which the park sits was owned by a Freed African Slave and was given to him by the Dutch because it was liken to swamp and useless land. This area was also the 1st African settlement north of Wall Street. Those bones and bodies are those of Free Africans.
If it can be proved to be the bones of one of the many blacks who lived near there in the 19th century (although many whites were buried in this Potter''s Field as well), WSP will be closed completely and forever as a momument, like the Burial Ground that is taking up space near Federal Building.
Gee, I hope Fat Al or Charles Barron don't hear about it. Who wants to lose WSP for another monument?
Blackcotton may be correct, though Dutch land grants of the 1640s had given way to English, and then American development by 1800.
As slavery wound down in the northeast, finding a job became more difficult for freed Africans. Most workshops, precursors to factories, had White workers who wouldn't work with Blacks. So Blacks were gradually excluded from the workplace and had to find work that was either menial or illegal.
Menial work meant those doing it would be poor, and poor people were buried at Washington Square.
Illegal work was done by criminals, and criminals also were buried there.
That early street-level racism led to the appalling conditions still today felt by many blacks. Imagine what this country would be like right now, if Blacks and Whites had worked and prospered together in 1809. There would have been no need to create Black churches or Black neighborhoods. Al Sharpton would have been just another guy, to answer "thefacts" above this post.
I go over such disparities in my Greenwich Village Comprehensive tour. Even New Yorkers could learn a lot by taking it.
Tourguide Stan
Then please explain why we have white neighborhoods divided along ethnic lines, to this very day.
I'll do it for you: because many people like to reside with their own kind.
Why do exclusively black gravesites get a special burial memorial, taking up land from the Clinton Federal Building, and white graveyards do not? If WSP were an exclusivly black cemetery, do you think there would be dog runs with dogs crapping on the final resting place of whites?
What would Fat Al say about that?
You may be a tour guide (and a self-promoting one at that), but I doubt you are also a sociologist, expert enough to discuss hypothetical historical race relations.
I'm so surprised at Gothamist's reporter first lifting parts of my story at the Washington Square Park Blog which broke this story in their first entry --
Compare WSP Blog post Monday 10/26 (which broke the story)
to this Gothamist piece later that day.
There is basically no attribution except a brief mention in that piece that a reader wrote in to WSP blog, as if all the reporting - and breaking of - the story did not also come from WSP Blog. In addition, WSP Blog first announced the discovery of the tombstone the previous Friday 10/23.
Gothamist has lost my respect and support with this. I wrote to the editor privately and she declined to respond. At the least, they should be respectful to their fellow bloggers.
Sincerely,
Cathryn Swan
Washington Square Park Blog.