This morning EV Grieve posted a mysterious photograph of a large hole in the middle of the New York City Marble Cemetery on East Second Street. He rightfully wondered what was going on there—maintenance? A new bar? Shake Shack?—so we figured we'd call and find out. The answer?
There will soon be a burial there. But there is another hole in the other New York Marble Cemetery in the East Village (the one down the block off Second Avenue without the gravestones) that has an actually interesting story to it.
The New York Marble Cemetery was the first non-sectarian cemetery in the city when it opened in 1830 and it still holds over 2,000 people. When it was built there were concerns about disease from dead bodies, so everyone was buried in its 156 below-ground vaults (made of solid white Tuckahoe marble, apparently). To get to those vaults one would enter through a "receiving vault." Which brings us back to that other hole.
According to Gresham Lang, who does work in the cemetery, last year while doing maintenance they found that one of the receiving vaults in the southwest corner had collapsed. Then, "when we were getting rid of the rubble we uncovered the foundation for the vault." Rather than immediately filling it back in they covered it up while the idea of "potentially using it as a display so we can explain to people how the vaults work." While such a display is a possibility (and a great idea—it can be very tricky to explain those vaults to people), nothing has been decided. The cemetery, like everything else these days, can use a buck or two.
So, to review, sometimes a hole in a cemetery is exactly what you think it is. And sometimes it is a collapsed receiving vault.
