Lutheran Cemetery (All Faiths Cemetery)

An 1882 pictorial illustrates the grounds of Lutheran Cemetery. (Munsell)

Lutheran Cemetery is one of over a dozen cemeteries developed along the Brooklyn-Queens border after the New York legislature passed the Rural Cemetery Act in 1847, spurring the creation of new large-scale cemeteries throughout the state. Founded in 1850 by the United Lutheran Churches of New York and incorporated in 1852, the cemetery was envisioned by Reverend F.W. Geissenhainer (1797-1879) when pastor of St. Paul’s Lutheran Church on Sixth Avenue and Fifteenth Street in Manhattan.

Through Dr. Geissenhainer’s efforts, and largely at his own personal cost, Lutheran Cemetery at Middle Village was established as an open, non-sectarian burial place where graves would be sold at affordable prices so that they could be available to people of limited means. By the 1880s, nearly 200,000 internments had been made in Lutheran Cemetery’s 225 acres and it was one of the busiest cemeteries in the vicinity of New York, averaging 12,000 interments each year. On Sundays, thousands of visitors took to the cemetery’s handsome, undulating grounds that included Trinity Lutheran Church, a chapel that was situated on a knoll in the south section of the cemetery.

This 1922 view of Lutheran Cemetery shows Trinity Lutheran Church, which stood near the entrance to the south section of the cemetery grounds. The church burned down in the 1970s; a community mausoleum stands on its site today. (NYPL)

Although Lutheran Cemetery has always welcomed people from all religious denominations, it was primarily patronized by the city’s German Protestant population during its early period. At the turn of the 20^th century, it was the metropolis’ leading German burial ground and today the cemetery’s older tombstones bear this out in their strong Northern European character and German surnames. Epitaphs, often in the German language and written in Gothic script, speak of great loss, sorrow, and a desire for peace.

A view of monuments in Lutheran Cemetery’s north section, April 2023 (Mary French)

Lutheran Cemetery was not only the favored place for the city’s German Americans to be laid to rest, it was also a preferred spot to take their own lives. German immigrants were unusually suicidal during the 19^th century—so much so that American economist and statistician Francis A. Walker called them “the great suiciding people among us.” Writing in 1875 about this phenomenon among German Americans, Walker noted that “one half of all the suicides which take place among the entire population are accredited to them.” Historical newspaper coverage reveals that over two dozen people committed suicide on the grounds of Lutheran Cemetery during the first 50 years of its history. Among them were Wilhelm Fuhlmer, a 26-year-old German tailor who in 1851 shot himself in the head on the grave of the wife of his grave and only child; Christopher Kunzman, who threw himself on a grave and slit his throat with a knife in 1872; and Frances Wittstadt, who poisoned herself on her husband’s grave in 1897.

A view of the Slocum Monument at Lutheran Cemetery, April 2023. (Chris Bendall)

Another tragic chapter in the history of the city’s German community is documented by the Slocum Monument situated in the south section of Lutheran Cemetery. The monument commemorates the 1,021 lives that were lost when the General Slocum steamboat caught fire and sank in the East River on June 15, 1904. Most of the passengers on board were members of St. Mark’s Lutheran Church, located in the area known as Little Germany on Manhattan’s Lower East Side.

The burning of the Slocum was New York City’s deadliest disaster until September 11, 2001, and the extensive loss of life led to the disintegration of the Lower East Side’s German community. Many of the Slocum victims were interred in private plots at Lutheran Cemetery and another 61 unidentified victims were interred in the common plot where the Slocum Monument stands. Though marking the burial place of the unidentified dead, the towering granite monument was intended to stand as an overall memorial of the disaster. It was unveiled on June 15, 1905, and an annual memorial service for the victims has been held at the monument every year since that date.

The Trump family gravesite at Lutheran Cemetery, April 2023 (Chris Bendall)

The Slocum Monument has long been the main historical attraction at Lutheran Cemetery, but recent events have raised interest in another spot here—the Trump family gravesite. Cemetery officials don’t disclose the location to the visitors, but forensic investigation will lead the determined explorer to the plot (hint: it’s near the cemetery’s southernmost boundary). Marked by a modest granite monument, it is the final resting place of former President Donald Trump’s paternal grandparents (Fred and Elizabeth), his parents (Fred and Mary), and his eldest brother, Fred Jr.

The historic Lutheran Cemetery now has over half a million interments and is known as “All Faiths Cemetery,” the result of a 1990 rebranding that was meant to better reflect the cemetery’s non-denominational status and the demographical and cultural shift in the communities it serves. The cemetery’s German clientele has disappeared as those families moved away and its newer graves and visitors reflect the eclectic mix of Latino, Slavic, and Asian families that have settled in the area in recent decades.

Chinese monuments marking newer graves stand in contrast to the older German plots at Lutheran Cemetery, April 2023 (Chris Bendall)

The location of Lutheran Cemetery in Middle Village, Queens. The cemetery’s 225 acres are separated into north and south sections on either side of  Metropolitan Avenue (OpenStreetMap)

View more photos of Lutheran / All Faiths Cemetery

Sources: The Cemeteries of New York (Judson 1881); History of Queens County (Munsell 1882); “With the Dead,” Brooklyn Times Union, Sep 14, 1888; The Leonard Manual of the Cemeteries of New York and Vicinity (1901); “Where Death Follows Death,” Newsday, Apr 20, 1988; “Occupations and Mortality of Our Foreign Population, 1870” Chicago Advance, Nov 12, Dec 10, 1874 and Jan 14, 1875. Reprinted in Discussions in Economics and Statistics (Walker 1899);  “Dreadful Suicide,” New York Spectator, Aug 28, 1851; “A Dramatic Suicide,” Brooklyn Daily Eagle, Feb 20 1872; “All Were Weary of Life,” Brooklyn Daily Eagle, Oct 19, 1897; “Many More Buried,” New York Times, Jun 21, 1904; “The Slocum Disaster. Monument for the Grave of the Unidentified Dead,” New York Tribune, Mar 5, 1905; “Infant Unveils Shaft,” New York Tribune, Jun 16, 1905; “A Spectacle of Horror—The Burning of the General Slocum,” Smithsonian Magazine, Feb 21, 2012; “Annual Memorial Service for Victims of General Slocum Tragedy,” Queens Gazette, Jun 27, 2018. “Tommy Hadziutko Marks 50 Years Working at All Faiths Cemetery in Queens,” Daily News, Dec 1, 2011; Queens Historical Society Walking Tour of Lutheran Cemetery, June 6, 2011; Our History – All Faiths Cemetery; All Faiths Cemetery Walk, November 6^th 2020; OpenStreetMap

Ocean View Cemetery

Gatehouse and entrance at Ocean View Cemetery, April 2017 (Mary French)

In the winter of 1899-1900, two new cemetery organizations—Ocean View and St. Agnes—began acquiring tracts of land near Staten Island’s south shore. By 1901 the two corporations owned several hundred acres stretching between Amboy Road and Arthur Kill Road in what is now the Oakwood/Richmond sections of Staten Island. The Ocean View Cemetery corporation, which absorbed the St. Agnes Cemetery corporation in 1905, established a namesake cemetery on part of the land they had amassed and sold off the remainder of the property to other cemetery corporations. Today this cemetery greenbelt includes United Hebrew Cemetery, Mount Richmond Cemetery, Frederick Douglass Memorial Park, and Ocean View Cemetery.

Ocean View Cemetery is located on Amboy Road in the Oakwood section of Staten Island. At 105 acres, it is one of the island’s largest cemeteries. Officially known as Ocean View—the Cemetery Beautiful, Inc., it is a nondenominational burial ground where over 50,000 people of diverse religions and nationalities are laid to rest.

From 1925 until 1940, part of Ocean View’s property was separately incorporated as Valhalla Burial Park, which was marketed to the local Scandinavian community. After the Valhalla Burial Park corporation declared bankruptcy in 1940, its grounds were reabsorbed into Ocean View Cemetery. Evidence of the former Valhalla Burial Park can be found on Ocean View’s north side, where there are large concentrations of grave markers bearing Norwegian, Swedish, and Danish surnames. Other notable burial grounds at Ocean View Cemetery include the Veterans section, marked by a flagpole and World War I monument, where a Veterans Day commemoration ceremony has been held every year since 1919, and the government-owned Merchant Marine Cemetery situated at a back corner of Ocean View.

A 1921 advertisement for the Ocean View Mausoleum

The intrepid explorer will find the ruins of Ocean View Mausoleum on a hill just south of the cemetery’s Amboy Road entrance. Designed by Clinton and Russell, one of New York’s leading architectural firms at the turn of the century, Ocean View Mausoleum was touted as the city’s first community mausoleum when it opened in 1920. Promotional materials describe it as a “scientific triumph and an artistic masterpiece,” “constructed of the finest grades of massive granite, stone, marble, and bronze,” “imposing in its air of grandeur and richness,” and “as permanent as the Pyramids of Egypt.” Today this once-celebrated structure is hidden from public view behind a stand of trees and visitor access to any loved ones interred within its crypts is blocked by a chainlink fence.

Fortunately, Ocean View Cemetery’s other architectural gem has withstood the passage of time and still stands majestically at the Amboy Road entrance. Part of landscape architect Daniel W. Langton’s original design for Ocean View’s grounds, the towered neo-Gothic stone gatehouse and imposing ironwork gates were completed in 1905.

This vintage postcard is in the Seymour B. Durst Old York Library collection at Columbia University. Postmarked 1911, it shows Ocean View’s entrance and gatehouse as they appeared in the cemetery’s early days.

The derelict Ocean View Mausoleum, March 2023 (Mary French)

Location of Ocean View Cemetery in Oakwood, Staten Island (OpenStreetMap)

View more photos of Ocean View Cemetery

Sources: The Leonard Manual of the Cemeteries of New York and Vicinity (1901); Fairchild Cemetery Manual (1910); Realms of History: The Cemeteries of Staten Island (Salmon 2006); One Thousand New York Buildings (Brockman & Harris 2002); AIA Guide to New York City (White et al 2010); “Communications from Departments and Corporation Officers,” The City Record, Nov 16, 1899; “Wrought Metal Work in America,” House and Garden, July 1905; “Business Troubles,” The Sun, Jun 16, 1906; Reports of Decisions of the Public Service Commission First District of the State of New York, Vol. IV Jan 1 1913 to Dec 31 1913 (Public Service Commission 1914); “Fights Attempt to Extend Cemetery,” New York Herald, Jul 12, 1919; “Open for Inspection,” Staten Island Advance, Sep 11, 1920; “Ocean View Mausoleum,” New York Herald, May 29, 1921; “Cemetery Seeks Reorganization,” Brooklyn Daily Eagle, Feb 3, 1940; “Frederick A. Bunn,” Otsego Farmer, May 1 1942; “‘Freedom Isn’t Free’: Veterans honored at Ocean View Cemetery Ceremony,” Staten Island Advance, Nov 11, 2022; Ocean View—The Cemetery Beautiful, Inc.

Flushing Cemetery

Flushing Cemetery, 2007. The cemetery’s floral and arboreal beauty memorialize Flushing’s history as a horticultural center (Terry Ballard-Creative Commons)

In the mid-19th century, the rapid growth of the population at Flushing, Queens, made it necessary to create a local cemetery large enough to accommodate citizens of all denominations for generations to come. The Flushing Cemetery Association formed in 1853, with trustees selected to manage the project. They purchased 21 acres about two miles southeast of the village, in the vicinity of Kissena Lake. With additional land purchases, Flushing Cemetery grew to encompass 75 acres on the south side of today’s 46^th Avenue, east of Pigeon Meadow Road.

Flushing Cemetery’s original 21 acres are shown in this detail from an 1859 map; additional lands were acquired to expand the cemetery to its current 75 acres

Since its inception, Flushing Cemetery has been known for its beautiful grounds. Flushing was America’s premiere horticultural center throughout most of the 18^th and 19^th centuries and the cemetery’s founding and succeeding trustees were mindful of this connection. They hired landscape architects and gardeners who created spacious lawns and gentle grades with a multitude of trees, ornaments, shrubbery, rare plants, and flowers. Dubbed a “wonderland of a million blooms” for the multi-colored spectacle of flowers present throughout the summer months, Flushing Cemetery has long been one of the most attractive and well-kept resting places in the metropolitan area.

Adding to the cemetery’s picturesque beauty is the Spanish-style administration building inside the entrance gate on 46^th Avenue. Built in 1912, it is of light brown ashlar stone with tile roofs and consists of an office building and a chapel. Just beyond the administration building is a collection of historical landmarks including several soldiers’ memorials and a massive World Trade Center monument that was erected by the cemetery’s board of directors in 2002. Also here is the Elliman Memorial Fountain. Originally erected in downtown Flushing in 1896 in honor of the philanthropist and temperance activist Mary Lawrence Elliman, the fountain was moved to the cemetery in 1907.

Older areas of the cemetery feature large plots of early families of Flushing, College Point, Whitestone, and Bayside, while newer sections are distinguished by tombstones featuring Greek and Chinese inscriptions of more recent immigrant communities. Since the early 1900s Flushing Cemetery also has been a major burial place for African Americans of Queens, Brooklyn, and Harlem. This is in stark contrast to the cemetery’s origins as an exclusively “white” cemetery—in 1864 its trustees passed a resolution “that all applications for interment of colored persons in the Flushing Cemetery be refused” and their prohibition against the burial of local people of African American and Native American ancestry was widely reported in local and national newspapers. These policies were lifted towards the end of the 1800s, allowing people of all races and ethnicities to acquire graves and family plots at Flushing Cemetery.

Louis Armstrong’s gravestone at Flushing Cemetery with the original bronze trumpet that was attached before it was stolen in the early 1980s. A new trumpet sculpted of white marble was installed atop his marker in 1984 (Louisiana Digital Library)

In what may be a case of divine retribution against the racist practices of the cemetery’s founding fathers, the most famous individual buried at Flushing Cemetery is black. Superstar trumpeter and singer Louis Armstrong was laid to rest here in 1971 after he died at his home in Corona, Queens, at age 71. Since then thousands of fans have visited his gravesite, leaving mementos at his tombstone.

Among other notables interred at Flushing Cemetery are State Supreme Court justice and founder of Queens College Charles S. Colden; financier and statesman Bernard Baruch; restauranteur Vincent Sardi, Sr.; Eugene Bullard, one of the world’s first black military pilots; Rev. Adam Clayton Powell, Sr., the prominent pastor of Abyssinian Baptist Church in Harlem and father of U.S. Congressman Adam Clayton Powell, Jr.; and jazz musicians Dizzy Gillespie, Charlie Shavers, and Hazel Scott.

Today Flushing Cemetery is the final resting place for approximately 45,000 people of diverse backgrounds. With over 300 interments each year, it still actively serves the present-day community while preserving the area’s historical and horticultural past.

The Consul General of France in New York lays a wreath at Eugene Bullard’s grave in Flushing Cemetery in 2021. Bullard, a native of Columbus, Georgia, was one of the world’s first black military pilots. He flew for the French Army Air Corps during WWI and was a spy for the French Resistance during WWII (Consulate General of France in New York)

A view of Flushing Cemetery, Jan 2016 (Mary French)

2018 aerial view of Flushing Cemetery (NYCThen&Now)

Sources: Topographical Map of the Counties of Kings and Queens, New York (Walling 1859); History of Queens County (Munsell 1882); The Leonard Manual of the Cemeteries of New York and Vicinity (1901); The Story of Flushing Cemetery (Stuart 1945); Flushing in the Civil War Era (Seyfried 2001); “Dedication of a New Cemetery at Flushing,” New York Times, Sep 2 1853; “Trouble at Flushing with the Colored Dead,” New York Tribune, June 26, 1866; “The Death of Mr. John Mingo,” Brooklyn Times Union, Nov 6, 1873; “Picturesque Past of Flushing Town,” Brooklyn Daily Eagle, Oct 1, 1899; “Beautiful Flushing Cemetery,” Brooklyn Times Union, Jul 13, 1901; “Plea for Preservation of Monument,” Brooklyn Times Union, Sep 14, 1907; “Memorial Moved,” Brooklyn Times Union, Dec 13, 1907; “Church and Chapel Among Week’s Building Permits,” Brooklyn Times Union, Sep 5 1912; “Flushing,” The Standard Union, Aug 28, 1921; “Trumpet Restored,” Daily News, Oct 17, 1984; “A Memorial Etched in Mourning,” Newsday, Feb 14, 2002; Commemorative Ceremony for the 60^th Death Anniversary of Veteran Eugene Bullard (Consulate General of France in New York)

Evergreens Cemetery

An 1893 photo of the ivy-clad administration building at Evergreens Cemetery, originally built as a chapel

It was still morning, and the quiet of the huge Evergreen Cemetery was broken only by the idling engine of Otis Chance’s big yellow backhoe. The machine was parked at the edge of the cemetery’s Ascension Section, a few yards from Yusef Hawkins’ grave, a few hundred yards from where Michael Griffith, victim of the Howard Beach racial attack, was buried on the day after Christmas in 1986. Otis Chance dug both of those holes in the sandy Queens earth. “I even carried Michael Griffith’s coffin,” he said. “You don’t always know who they’re for, but the foreman told us yesterday this one was for Hawkins,” said Chance, a 34-year-old black man who owns and lives in a house in Brooklyn’s Williamsburg section. “It’s a tragedy, a damn shame, nonsense, stupidity,” he said, shaking his head. “It was the same way with Griffith—it didn’t make any sense, what happened. You feel so bad, so sorry for the families.” (Daily News, Aug 31, 1989)

A view of Manhattan from Evergreens Cemetery, Apr 2016

Evergreens Cemetery is a non-denominational burial ground created in 1849 that spans 225 acres along the Brooklyn-Queens border. Prominent landscape architect Andrew Jackson Downing designed the grounds, and the results were described as “a perfect rural cemetery” by one 19th-century guide to New York City cemeteries. The wooded landscape includes winding paths traversing an undulating terrain, high points that offer scenic vistas of the Manhattan skyline and Jamaica Bay, and a picturesque Gothic Revival chapel designed by architect Alexander Jackson Davis in 1849/50  (now used as an administration building). 

Celestial Hill, an early Chinese burial ground at Evergreens Cemetery, Mar 2018 (Mary French)

Evergreens is the resting place of over 526,000 people of diverse religious and ethnic backgrounds; among the notables interred here are dancer Bill “Bojangles” Robinson, jazz musician Lester Young, and world chess champion William Steinitz. Distinctive plots include the Seaman’s Grounds, which hold the remains of more than 1,200 sailors; Celestial Hill, one of the early burial grounds for New York’s Chinese immigrants; and the Actors Fund Plot, where 500 members of the entertainment industry are interred. Also of note is the Triangle Shirtwaist Fire Memorial, a haunting monument to several victims of the 1911 Triangle factory fire buried here; the victims’ names, unidentified for a century, were uncovered in 2011 through the persistence of researcher Michael Hirsch and have been added to the memorial.

Yusuf Hawkins’ grave at Evergreens Cemetery, Mar 2018 (Mary French)

The graves of Michael Griffith and Yusuf Hawkins—both victims of late-1980s racial attacks—are in an area of modest graves on the northern side of Evergreens Cemetery. Unlike older sections of the cemetery that are named for pastoral features such as Sylvan Dell, Lake View, and Hickory Knoll, these newer sections are named for biblical themes. In the Redemption section is the burial place of 23-year-old Michael Griffith, killed in 1986 when he was struck by a car as he was chased onto a highway by a group of young white men in the Howard Beach neighborhood of Queens. Three years later, 16-year-old Yusuf Hawkins was laid to rest in the nearby Ascension section after he was shot to death during an attack by a white mob in Bensonhurst, Brooklyn. The peacefulness of the gravesites of these two young men is a stark contrast to the anguish and civic unrest that followed their deaths, one of the worst periods of racial tension in New York City’s history.

Monument at the center of the Seaman’s Plot, Evergreens Cemetery , Mar 2018 (Mary French)

Location of Evergreens Cemetery Brooklyn-Queens border (OpenStreetMap)

View more photos of Evergreens Cemetery

Sources: The Cemeteries of New York (Judson 1881); The Eagle and Brooklyn: The Record of the Progress of the Brooklyn Daily Eagle…(Brooklyn Daily Eagle 1893); Green Oasis in Brooklyn: The Evergreens Cemetery 1849-2008 (Rousmaniere 2008); The Evergreens Cemetery—The Cultural Landscape Foundation; The Evergreens Cemetery; “When Jack Tar Dies in Port—A Final Resting Place in the Evergreens Cemetery,” New York Times, May 28 1893;  “He’ll Bid Yusef His Last Farewell,” New York Daily News, Aug 31, 1989; “100 Years Later, the Roll of the Dead in a Factory Fire Is Complete,” New York Times, Feb 20, 2011; “The Story Behind HBO’s Yusuf Hawkins: Storm Over Brooklyn,” Time, Aug 13, 2020; OpenStreetMap

St. Michael’s Cemetery

A large stylized cross and rows of small plain crosses mark the Community of St. John the Baptist plot at St. Michael’s Cemetery, where early sisters of this order of Episcopal nuns are buried. (Mary French, Aug 2021)

In 1852, Rev. Thomas McClure Peters acquired seven acres of farmland in Newtown, Queens, to establish a new cemetery that would provide graves and dignified burials for the poor. Rev. Peters, the rector of St. Michael’s Episcopal Church in Manhattan, had devoted himself to mission work in the city’s almshouses, prisons, and hospitals, and among its poorest and most disenfranchised communities. He developed an understanding of the needs of these communities and believed it was possible to run a cemetery on business principles and at the same time furnish the poorer classes of the city with burials at a price within their means. Once he had the cemetery laid out and functioning successfully, Rev. Peters turned it over to the corporation of St. Michael’s Church, which owns and manages it to this day.

St. Michael’s Cemetery gradually added more land over the years to reach its present size of roughly 88 acres in the area bounded by the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway and the Grand Central Parkway in East Elmhurst, Queens. Various churches and charitable institutions acquired sections within the cemetery, public grounds were set aside for free and low-cost burials, and private lots were purchased by individuals and families. St. Michael’s Cemetery still serves a diverse constituency and is the final resting place of roughly 175,000 people from all classes, religions, and ethnicities.

Robert Kellner monument at St. Michael’s Cemetery, 1983 (Jackson & Vergara)

The older family plots at St. Michael’s are predominately German and the dark gray markers here are frequently ornamented with statues depicting angels, lamenting females, and other classical imagery. Also here is a life-sized statue of a Doughboy adorning the gravestone of 24-year-old Cpl. Robert L. Kellner, who was killed on the battlefield of the Argonne Forest, France, in 1918. Later sections have markers with Italian and Greek-lettered names, while more recent monuments carry Chinese and Korean inscriptions. The cemetery’s crematorium, opened in 2005, accommodates the needs of the city’s large Hindu population.

The burial place of St. Michael’s most renowned resident—African American composer and pianist Scott Joplin—is found amid the modest markers and unmarked graves in the cemetery’s public grounds. Dubbed the “King of Ragtime,” Joplin experienced a brief period of fame at the turn of the 20^th century, but his career was cut short by mental health issues and he died in poverty in 1917 at age 49. His family was too poor to provide a stone or marker for his grave, and Joplin faded into obscurity as his music waned in popularity.

Plaque marking Scott Joplin’s grave at St. Michael’s Cemetery, Aug 2021 (Mary French)

In 1973, the Academy Award-winning film The Sting stimulated a revival of ragtime and renewed interest in Joplin when his 1902 composition “The Entertainer” was used as the film’s theme music, topping the musical charts for months. The following year, the American Society of Composers, Authors, and Publishers (ASCAP) installed a bronze plaque at Joplin’s unmarked grave at St. Michael’s. In 2004, St. Michael’s began holding annual ragtime concerts on its grounds in Joplin’s honor, and in 2017 added a memorial bench at the gravesite to commemorate the centennial of his death.

1983 photo showing wreckage of once orderly rows of tombstones at St. Michael’s Cemetery (Jackson & Vergara)

During the 1970s, St. Michael’s fell into disrepair because of budget cuts and a lack of maintenance and experienced a period of intense vandalism and neglect through the 1980s. Intruders toppled hundreds of tombstones throughout the cemetery and  weeds and underbrush completely enveloped the monuments in some sections. At one point, the lack of adequate fencing allowed motorbikes and even cars to drive among gravesites in the cemetery’s southern corner. But a large-scale renovation in the early 1990s restored the historic cemetery to its past beauty, and today it is well maintained and continually expanding through the construction of community mausoleums.

Another modern addition at St. Michael’s is a collection of memorials devoted to the city’s first responders who lost their lives on 9/11 and before. The most striking of these is the Christopher Santora memorial, honoring 76 firefighters who lived or worked in Queens that died on September 11, 2001. The memorial’s centerpiece is a black marble slab bearing an etched image of Santora, the youngest firefighter to die at the World Trade Center on 9/11. These memorials to the city’s service members are a continuation of St. Michael’s mission to create places to remember and celebrate lives.

The Christopher Santora/Sept. 11 Firefighters Memorial at St. Michael’s Cemetery, Aug 2021 (Mary French)

Location of St. Michael’s Cemetery in East Elmhurst, Queens (OpenStreetMap)

Vintage photo showing reporters gathering for the interment of mobster Frank Castello’s casket in the family mausoleum at St. Michael’s Cemetery, February 21, 1973

View more photos of St. Michael’s Cemetery

Sources: Annals of St. Michael’s: Being the History of St. Michael’s Protestant Episcopal Church, New York for One Hundred Years 1807-1907 (Peters 1907); St. Michael’s Cemetery – About; Silent Cities: The Evolution of the American Cemetery (Jackson & Vergara 1989); King of Ragtime: Scott Joplin and His Era, 2^nd ed (Berlin 2016); “Our Cities of the Dead,” Brooklyn Daily Eagle, April 28, 1895; “Costello & Legend are Buried,” Daily News, Feb 22, 1973; “A True Note at Composer’s Grave,” Daily News, Oct 7, 1974; “Requiem for the Cemetery?” Daily News, Nov 8, 1974; “Queens Vandals Topple Markers on 300 Graves,” New York Times, Apr 5, 1980; “Seek to Stop Cemetery’s Decline,” Daily News, Jan 11, 1983; “700 Stones Overturned at Cemetery,” New York Times, Aug 10, 1991; “E. Elmhurst Biz Plots for the Future,” QNS.com, May 19, 2004; “Memorial to Firefighers Who Died on 9/11 Is Dedicated,” Queens Gazette, Sep 16, 2004; “New Final Home Underway in Boro,” Queens Tribune, Jun 10, 2010 “Queens Cemetery’s Attempts to Expand on Park Land in Limbo, Daily News, Aug 15, 2013; “Visit to a Historic Cemetery,” CSJB Newsletter, Spring 2013; “Three-Story, 18,800-Square-Foot Mausoleum Coming To St. Michael’s Cemetery, Woodside,” New York Yimby, June 29, 2016; “Joplin Tribute Draws Hundreds of Admirers,” Queens Chronicle, May 23, 2019