Among the more notable of the remnants of the time when the Greenwich region for the most part was open country are those at the southeast corner of Eleventh Street and Sixth Avenue: the little triangular graveyard and the two old framed dwellings which now rest on the lines of the street and the avenue, but which primitively stood—a few feet from their present site—on the now almost obliterated Milligan’s Lane. The triangular graveyard is a remnant of the second Beth Haim, or Place of Rest, owned on this island by the Jews . . . a plot of ground with a front of about fifty feet on Milligan’s Lane, and thence extending, a little east of south, about one hundred and ten feet. In the year 1830, when Eleventh Street was opened on the lines of the City Plan . . . almost the whole of the Jewish burial-ground was swept away. The street went directly across it—leaving only the corner on its south side, and a still smaller corner on its north side. (Harper’s New Monthly Magazine, June 1893)
In 1804, Congregation Shearith Israel purchased land in Greenwich Village to serve as a burial place to supplement its old graveyard near Chatham Square. The new property, about 50 x 100 feet on Milligan Street,* was dedicated as Beth Haim Shenee (The Second Cemetery) in 1805. When first established, the new cemetery was used mostly as a burial place for those dying of contagious diseases and for new immigrants who had no family ties to the old graveyard. When the Chatham Square cemetery fell out of use following city ordinances in the 1820s that prohibited burials in lower Manhattan, the cemetery on Milligan Street became the Congregation’s primary burial ground. It functioned in this capacity only until 1829—in 1830, 11th Street was extended through the cemetery, leaving just a small remnant of the graveyard intact. Burials that were in the path of the street were reinterred in this portion of the cemetery, which exists today as a small trianglar plot on the south side of 11th Street, just east of the Avenue of the Americas. A few dozen headstones are still present at the site.
See more photos of the Second Shearith Israel Cemetery.
*According to Old Streets of New York, Milligan Street ran perpendicular to Greenwich Avenue from its present intersection with West 10th Street, through the southeast corner of Sixth Avenue and 11th Street, to what is now the south side of 12th Street about 200 feet east of Sixth Avenue. It was obliterated when the city’s grid plan was imposed on the area.
Sources: “Greenwich Village,” Harper’s New Monthly Magazine, June 1893, p. 356; Iconography of Manhattan Island, 1498-1909, 5:1429, 1689; Portraits Etched in Stone 123-133 (David de Sola Pool 1952); NYCityMap
New York City Cemetery Project 
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