From the NY Times:Over the past 17 years, thousands of pieces of human remains dating back to the 18th century have been unearthed in the course of construction projects in and around City Hall.
In a quiet ceremony on Sunday afternoon presided over by Christian, Jewish and Islamic clerics, city officials reburied them and unveiled a marker in their remembrance, near a grove of ginkgo trees at the northeast corner of City Hall Park.
The burials were associated with an almshouse built in 1736 where City Hall now stands, two prisons, a barracks for British soldiers and the African Burial Ground.
“Some of the earliest New Yorkers were laid to rest on and near this site,” the landmarks preservation commissioner, Robert B. Tierney, said at the ceremony. “It is my hope that this marker might compel anyone who comes upon it to stop, read it, and maybe consider for a moment the New Yorkers who were a part of a settlement that evolved into the great city New York is today.”
Let's not dwell on the other locations of graves that have been disturbed in order to accommodate development. Rarely are the remains ever reburied and the dead commemorated with plaques. (It tends to be bad for real estate sales.)
8 comments:
Where were the Buddhists, Hindus, Sikhs, Wiccans, and animists? I demand to know. What's with this preference for "Abrahamic" religions? Abraham, Schmabraham.
Every once in a while this administration does the right thing, and I am proud to be a New Yorker.
I must disagree. The administration often does the right thing, but only for the right people.
Well, I guess this time the "right people" died hundreds of years ago.
"Show me the manner in which a nation cares for its dead and I will measure with mathematical exactness the tender mercies of its people, their respect for the laws of the land, and their loyalty of high ideals."
~ William Gladstone (1808-98), British Prime Minister
No they were just buried in the right location.
City Hall is literally built on the bodies of poor and working class people.
how appropriate that an Almshouse (workhouse or poorhouse) was the site of our current City Hall.
may the mayor be haunted for eternity.
They should have closed down City Hall - it doesn't function anyway. Look at all the bones it left behind from the past!
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