Amity Street Baptist Burial Ground

Detail from and 1852 map showing the Amity Street Baptist Burial Ground at the corner of Amity (now 3rd Street) and Wooster streets

In February 1863, the New York Times reported:

The rapid march of improvement, which forms so distinguishing a characteristic of the Manhattanese, is daily removing or transforming the old landmarks that have been to this generation silent reminders of olden days and a Knickerbocker ancestry. The resting places wherein were interred (as was thought for all time) the remains of those of our progenitors who have passed from earth, are no longer yielded up to the silent dead; the increase of business and population rendering the sites of their “narrow houses” more valuable to the mercantile and manufacturing community than when the practice of intramural interments was universal in Gotham…Among the other localities thus transformed, or to be transformed, is the old burying-ground corner of Amity and Wooster streets adjoining the Amity-street Baptist Church.

The “old burying-ground” at the corner of Amity Street (later 3^rd Street) and Wooster was established in 1814 by the Fayette/Oliver Street Baptist Church; formed in 1795, the Fayette/Oliver Street church was among Manhattan’s earliest Baptist congregations. They buried some 1,200 congregants in their small Greenwich Village cemetery that was fenced in on the Amity and Wooster streets sides and bounded on the east by the Amity Street Baptist Church, an offshoot of the Oliver Street congregation that constructed their building in 1834 on an unused section of the cemetery land. By 1849, the Amity Street Baptist burial ground was full—so full, in fact, that it closed soon after the City Inspector found, during a visit in July of that year, “the coffin in one grave was only two feet from the surface; another, two feet four inches, and another, one foot ten inches. A child, buried on Monday last, was interred just two feet three inches below the surface; and there were ten new graves, in not one of which was the coffin three feet under the surface.”

Newspaper notice announcing removal of remains from the Amity Street burial ground, Feb 17, 1863

In the 1860s, both the Oliver Street Baptist Church and the Amity Street Baptist Church followed the northward migration of residents and moved uptown, and the decision was made to sell the Amity Street property. Trustees of the Madison Avenue Baptist Church, which had consolidated with the Oliver Street Church, purchased lots at Cypress Hills Cemetery and received permission from the city to exhume the bodies from the Amity Street burial ground for reinterment at Cypress Hills. 

“Many of the wealthiest and most prominent Knickerbocker families in the City” were said to have ancestors interred in the Amity Street burial ground, and they were none too pleased by the church trustees’ decision to relocate the bodies. “One gentleman pronounced the proceeding disgraceful and unchristian, inhuman and barbarous,” the New York Times disclosed. Another man said “that if he acted on his own natural impulses, he would shoot the first man who attempted to unearth his mother’s remains;” a third declared the trustees “to be a soulless, godless corporation, in which no sentiment of honor or humanity existed.” Despite these protests, the Amity Street Baptist burial ground was emptied of its mortal remains, and the property was redeveloped. NYU’s Stern School of Business occupies the site today.

2018 aerial view of the former site of the Amity Street Baptist Burial Ground

Sources: Dripps’ 1852 Map of the City of New-York extending northward to Fiftieth St; Minutes of the Common Council of the City of New York, 1784-1831 (City of New York 1917), 9:125; A History of the Churches of All Denominations in the City of New York from the First Settlement to the Year 1846 (Greenleaf 1846), 258-259; “The Cemeteries,” New York Herald, Jul 26, 1849; “More Removing of Dead Bodies,” New York Herald Feb 15, 1863; “Local Intelligence,” New York Times, Feb 16, 1863; “Special Notice,” New York Herald Feb 17, 1863; “Our Fathers—Where Are They? Exhumation of Remains in the Amity-Street Burial-Ground,” New York Times, Feb 17, 1863; “Record of Important Events,” Frank Leslie’s Sunday Magazine, Vol 13, Jan/June 1883, 217; The Cypress Hills Cemetery 1880 [catalog & list of lot holders]; NYC Then&Now

St. Mary’s Cemetery, Grasmere

St. Mary’s Cemetery, Grasmere, May 2017 (Mary French)

When Burton Kaplan and NYPD detective Stephen Caracappa met, they followed a protocol designed to prevent detection. If Kaplan, the envoy of Lucchese crime family underboss Anthony Casso, wanted to meet Caracappa, he pulled up outside Caracappa’s mother’s house on Kramer Street in the Grasmere section of Staten Island and beeped his horn. Kaplan would then proceed down Kramer Street to a  cemetery there that was nearly always empty. Surrounded by a chain-link fence, the headstones in the graveyard were modest, the surnames mostly Italian. Kaplan would get out of his car and wait for Caracappa. The two men would walk and talk along the pathways between the graves. The cemetery rolled into a small rise overlooking the neighborhood and affording a view of the Verrazzano-Narrows Bridge. It is the place where Caracappa received hundreds of thousands of dollars in exchange for orchestrating—along with his partner, detective Louis Eppolito—eight gangland murders between 1986 and 1990. The infamous “Mafia Cops” were convicted in 2006 and died in federal prison.

A 1907 map shows the two sections of St. Mary’s Cemetery on Parkinson Ave.

The graveyard where Kaplan and Caracappa met for their late-night criminal rendezvous was St. Mary’s Cemetery, one of the oldest Catholic cemeteries on Staten Island. The Roman Catholic parish of St. Mary’s was established in 1852 in Rosebank by Father John Lewis. In 1862 Father Lewis purchased seven acres of land located on the former Leonard Parkinson estate, about two miles southwest from St. Mary’s Church at Rosebank, and laid it out as a cemetery. This hilltop parcel is bounded by today’s Parkinson Avenue and Kramer Street. In 1905 St. Mary’s Cemetery expanded with the purchase of a separate three-and-a-half-acre parcel nearby on Parkinson Avenue and Old Town Road (now Reid Avenue). St. Mary’s parish closed in 2015 and merged with St. Joseph’s of Rosebank; St. Mary’s Cemetery is now managed by the parish of St. Joseph and Mary Immaculate.

During their grim exchanges at St. Mary’s Cemetery, Kaplan and Caracappa passed by the graves of some 20,000 Catholic locals laid to rest here. Among them are Pvt. Thomas B. Wall, who died of battle wounds received in the Philippines and was buried at St. Mary’s with military honors in 1900; Rev. James F. Mee, pastor of St. Mary’s parish from 1889 to 1908, whose monument marks the apex of a central knoll in the old cemetery; and Vietnam war hero Nick Lia, killed in action in 1968. Marine Lt. Lia has a Staten Island park named in his honor and and a memorial scultpure of him stands at Wagner College, where he was a football star.

St. Mary’s Cemetery, Old Section, May 2017 (Mary French)

St Mary’s Cemetery, New Section, May 2017 (Mary French)

A 2018 aerial view of St. Mary’s Cemetery

View more photos of St. Mary’s Cemetery

Sources: Robinson’s 1907 Atlas of the Borough of Richmond, Pl 14; Annals of Staten Island (Clute 1877), 299-300; “Soldier Buried With Honor,” The Sun, Apr 9, 1900; [Notice], Richmond County Advance, June 17, 1905; Fairchild Cemetery Manual (1910), 150; Realms of History: The Cemeteries of Staten Island (Salmon 2006), 154-156; Italian Staten Island (Mele 2010), 86-87; The Brotherhoods:The True Story of Two Cops Who Murdered for the Mafia (Lawson & Oldham 2006); United States v. Eppolito, 436 F. Supp. 2D 532 (E.D.N.Y 2006)