If you die and want to be buried in New York City, you might have to accept something less than what you wanted. Not the the deceased will be worrying about it… But the issue of burial space is a real one in the Big Apple. Following is an excerpt from an interesting article in the August 15, 2010 edition of the New York Times about the quickly dwindling supply of grave sites.
THOSE of us among the living all know New York City can be maddeningly expensive, whether one is shopping for a $40 million
mansion on Fifth Avenue or a $2,500 studio walk-up in a former tenement on the Lower East Side.
For the dead, however, virtually no amount of money will secure a final resting place in the heart of a city that is fast running out of graveyard space.
And in the parts of town where a burial plot is still available, the cost has in some cases more than tripled in less than a decade; aboveground mausoleums can fetch upward of $3 million. Cemeteries are scrambling to create more space, and as plot prices have soared, the number of cremations has also risen, with a quarter of New Yorkers choosing the less expensive alternative.
Trinity Church Cemetery in Washington Heights, the last operating graveyard in Manhattan, has stopped selling plots, offering burial only in the most “extraordinary circumstances,” or to people with long-held reservations.
The largest Jewish graveyard in Brooklyn, Washington Cemetery, ran out of land in the winter after tearing up roads and pathways to utilize every cubic inch of ground. Evergreens and Cypress Hills, also in Brooklyn, may sprawl, but not enough, and dozens of smaller cemeteries spread across the five boroughs are squeezed, too. The city’s largest Catholic cemetery, Calvary in Queens, is close to capacity. And even the most famous of them all, Green-Wood Cemetery in Brooklyn, has only about five more years before it will be forced to stop selling plots.
More than 50 years have passed since a major cemetery was established within the city, and no new burial grounds are planned. But New Yorkers continue to die, some 60,000 a year.
Read the full article by Marc Santora in the August 15, 2010 edition of the New York Times.
Thanks to Pat Morrow for alerting me to this fascinating article.
