The Cemetery Belt

“The stench was so offensive as to cause several of my laborers to cascade freely.”

There’s one question that’s bound to bubble up if you spend much time exploring around the Brooklyn-Queens border, and that is: Why are there so many dead people here? Everywhere I explore on foot, it seems, there are cemeteries. The big mass of green on the map to the west of our new apartment? Mostly cemeteries! The park we’ve been jogging around in Ridgewood? Some park, but mostly cemetery! Two, in fact.

Thankfully, in 2017, the New York Times covered this very question. And the answer is really very simple: In the 19th century, Manhattan was running out of space for its dead, and the smell was getting pretty bad. As Keith Williams reported:

As a result, by 1822, unbearable odors were emanating from some cemeteries. To try to speed decomposition, one official had the yard at Trinity Church slaked with lime; he later wrote to a colleague, “The stench was so offensive as to cause several of my laborers to cascade freely.” (Yes, “cascade” means exactly what you think it does.) Burials were banned south of Canal Street the next year.

The undeveloped land along the Brooklyn-Queens corridor was deemed too poor for farming and therefore an ideal location to stash some bodies. In 1847, the state passed the Rural Cemetery Act, which allowed religious institutions and other entities to buy tax-exempt property for grave sites. Hundreds of thousands of bodies were exhumed from their “final” resting places in Manhattan—to make room for the living—and relocated. “Because of mass burials and disintegrated coffins, many of the remains had scattered.”

The result? Nearly five million corpses are buried in more than a dozen cemeteries along the Brooklyn-Queens border—outnumbering the living two to one—in an area sometimes called the “Cemetery Belt.”

Aerial view of Highland Park (with the reservoir) and surrounding cemeteries in Queens, NY. (Photo: Joe Mabel)

Of course, Brooklyn and Queens didn’t remain undevelopable forever, and now there’s a whole lot of roads and buildings around here and a very limited amount of greenspace that is enjoyed by mostly dead people! The Evergreens Cemetery, for example, which I pass en route to Highland Park, explicitly bans “jogging, biking, and other recreational activities.” Cypress Hills Cemetery, on the other hand, does not, and it holds an annual 5K race in honor of a police officer. I’ve not yet visited¹—having only learned about this exception just now while researching the newsletter—and I’m not sure if I would have the nerve to try jogging through it.

It’s not that I’m terribly salty about the off-limits greenspace, but isn’t it a shame? Running to Highland Park—which is by far my favorite running destination in the new neighborhood—is a commitment. It’s 2.3 miles just to the closest entrance, so it really doesn’t make sense for anything under six miles. And at least half of that distance is along a loud, car-jammed, heavily trafficked road, so it’s not the most pleasant. But the entrance to the Evergreens Cemetery (which I pass on the way to Highland Park) is just 1.6 miles from our apartment. Wouldn’t it be nice if I could just pop in there for a jog amongst the (225 acres!) of trees? Alas!

More significantly, as I build up my mileage with an eye to eventually running out to Forest Park—which this Brooklyn-pilled girlie thinks of as the “Prospect Park of Queens”—I’m positively beside myself that it seems like I have to run on the outside of all that beautiful greenspace, when the Jackie Robinson Parkway gets a primo route through the heart of it all. You can’t tell me that can be all that peaceful or respectful of the dead piled up on either side.

---

Reading list

“Peak misogyny”: I didn’t think that there would be an obvious Pinch of Dirt angle to the Luigi Mangione story, but I was wrong. While traveling in Japan earlier this year, Mangione told a friend he had climbed Mount Omine, “which he noted was known for its tests of courage and also for prohibiting women from climbing it,” the New York Times reported. “This mountain is peak misogyny,” Mangione wrote his friend.

My editor pointed out (after going down a Wikipedia rabbit hole) that Mount Fuji was also off limits to women until 1868. Women are not only banned from climbing Mount Athos in Greece—they aren’t even allowed within 500 meters of the coast.

If you want to read one article about the ban on Mount Omine, I’d suggest this 2004 Los Angeles Times piece, which covers some of the (unsuccessful) activism by Japanese women’s groups to change the policy ahead of its designation as a World Heritage site.

From my day job: I highly recommend reading Vince Beiser’s new book Power Metal: The Race for the Resources That Will Shape the Future. I had the pleasure of interviewing the author for the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. For a book purportedly about mining and metals, there was a lot more about bike lanes (and public transit—two of my favorite things!) than I was expecting.

Also: For Audubon, I interviewed an artist who carves bird decoys.

1. But I want to go and pay my respects to Mae West!