From the Daily News:Before the Civil War, a Methodist parish in Flushing buried its dead near where 37th Ave. meets 138th St. today - a fact confirmed by city reports and newspapers.
But in 1954, after a perfunctory excavation failed to find human remains there, the city chalked up the cemetery to local lore - and paved it over for a parking lot.
Decades later, that decision is facing renewed scrutiny from archeologists who want the city to dig up the plot yet again - believing bodies still rest where a complex is set to go up next year.
The city Economic Development Corp. has dismissed the calls for excavation as thinly veiled attempts to halt construction of Flushing Commons, a mix of housing and retail on the site of the municipal parking lot.
An EDC spokesman, David Lombino, argued that opponents of the project - who fear its effect on small businesses and traffic - will jump on anything to stop it before a looming City Council vote.
"There are no plans to revisit that determination" of a nonexistent graveyard, Lombino said.
But a Daily News investigation has found the city Corporation Counsel's decision to deem the graves "nonexistent" on Feb. 3, 1954, may have been hasty.
A spokeswoman for the Law Department said that records of the excavation - two weeks of hand-digging in 1953 that did not turn up any bones - were "not readily available" last week.
The spokeswoman, Connie Pankratz, vowed to search in off-site archives in coming weeks.
The EDC insists the cemetery does not exist - though their officials cannot produce records showing how the Public Works Agency carried out the excavation.
The city declared the cemetery "nonexistent" despite 20th-century accounts of tombstones in the Brooklyn Eagle and Long Island Daily Press.
A 1950 story in the Long Island Daily Press even reported two specific burials in church records: "C. Silliman" in 1846 and "Hutson grandchild" in 1857.
A city report in 1988 indicated that some bodies from the Methodist graveyard were reinterred in Flushing Cemetery between 1853 and 1867.
A Flushing Cemetery superintendent, however, told The News last week that he could not find any records of the Methodist reinterrments - exposing another potential flaw in the city's stance.
Even if the exhumations took place, the 1988 report suggested at least 30 bodies were unaccounted for. They could still lie beneath the parking lot - and at the center of one of the most controversial projects in Queens.
4 comments:
Garanteed old bodies are there. The EDC-turd just wants a smooth project. Finding even one human bone would shut down the entire project for years while EIS's and archeology and exhumation would take place, at the full expense of the developer.
Garanteed old bodies are there. The EDC-turd just wants a smooth project. Finding even one human bone would shut down the entire project for years while EIS's and archeology and exhumation would take place, at the full expense of the developer.
Now let's see if our new burro historian Dr. Jack-off Eichenbaum will agree that there are no bodies buried there.
He will, no doubt, agree with the NYC liars if he wants to keep his "vaunted" position (and office) at boro hall.
Hey, you nut-less wonders at the Queens Historical Society....will you knuckle under too and agree with the city's position that no graves exist?
You'd better if you want to keep your funding!
The discovery of skeletal remains can have grave consequences for the EDC, Bovine Shulman, and Bloomie's rich developer buddies. Make no bones about it!
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