Washington Heights

New York City’s population of the dead, like its living souls, has mostly relocated to the outer boroughs due the overcrowding and high real estate prices of Manhattan. Many of the island’s cemeteries were exhumed (although the bodies were not necessarily all collected, resulting in some skeletons lingering in the ground) during the past 150 years and reinterred in these new cemeteries, but there remain a few burial grounds embedded in the urban landscape of Manhattan, from gated lots so small as to be unnoticed, like First Shearith Israel Graveyard, the only surviving 17th century structure in Manhattan, to Potter’s Fields that have since become parks, including Washington Square Park and Bryant Park. The borough’s remaining active cemetery is Trinity Cemetery in Washington Heights, which, with Trinity and St. Paul’s churchyards in Lower Manhattan, is part of the Episcopal Parish of Trinity Church burial grounds, a group of three cemeteries that maintains a historic and artistic presence for memorial history in the city.