If you have been following FNY for awhile now, you know brick architecture is my favorite type–to me you can’t go wrong with red bricks. When you see an overhanging vinyl awning sign, walk under it and look under the awning - hidden treasures, like this Wetter’s (?) sign may await you.
#CALVARY CEMETERY MARY BULGER FULL#
Since I am an ancient graybeard now, I remember when drugstores had these glass pitchers or bottles full of colored liquid in the window. I kept my eyes peeled for old school signs like this one at a drugstore, which uses the old vessel with a pestle motif. We met at Woodside LIRR and made down Roosevelt Avenue then Greenpoint Avenue toward the cemetery. We set off in mid-July under the Burning Thermonuclear Eye of God Itself. He has done extensive research on the cemetery and who and what is there. Despite its no nonsense quality (original interments cost families seven dollars, and family members often dug the graves themselves) Calvary sometimes has a surrealistic atmosphere, with the beetling towers of Manhattan and Queens the backdrop.Īlong for the journey was Newtown Pentacle master Mitch Waxman, who has made Newtown Creek and what surrounds it his spare time’s complete focus. It is not a burial park, as Green-Wood or Woodlawn were designed to be rather, it was a place where, when you’re dead, to get yourself buried, as the feared showbiz columnist J. Moravian in Staten Island, the resting place for generations of Vanderbilts, is a probability in Staten Island. I have been to Woodlawn once, and figure to return again for a possible ForgottenTour. My usual cemetery of choice for exploration to satisfy my thanatophilia has been Green-Wood in Brooklyn, due to its accessibility, but I figured the time has come to see more of NYC’s more prominent burial grounds. Smaller, pre-existing cemeteries were part of the original acreage, and were then surrounded by Calvary. New Calvary, in three divisions, is west of 58th Street (formerly Betts Avenue) from Queens Boulevard south to 55th Avenue. The original Calvary Cemetery lies between the Long Island Expressway (formerly Borden Avenue), Greenpoint Avenue and 37th Street, Review Avenue and Laurel Hill Boulevard.
The original acreage had been nearly filled by the late 1860s, so additional surrounding acreage was later purchased to the east.
Calvary Cemetery, named for the hill where Christ was crucified, opened in 1848.
Patrick’s Cathedral on Mulberry Street in what is today known as Little Italy began buying up property in western Queens. Presciently anticipating the legislation, trustees of the old St. In 1847 the Rural Cemetery Act was passed, prohibiting any new burial grounds from being established on the island of Manhattan. Queens, too, had dozens of tiny burial grounds scattered around, many dating to the mid-1600s. The two largest cemeteries had been developed by Trinity Cemetery, in the churchyard adjacent to its ancient Broadway and Wall Street location, and uptown in the furthest reaches of civilized Manhattan territory, the wild north of 155th and Broadway.īy the 1840s Brooklyn’s largest cemeteries, Green-Wood and Most Holy Trinity, and Woodlawn in the Bronx were accepting interments and in Staten Island there was Moravian, developed in the 1760s, and myriads of smaller cemeteries. In the mid-19th Century Manhattan was getting so crowded (by 1845 the island was fully built up south of about 42nd Street) that it was running out of cemetery space.