Thanks again George, was that project 9 years ago! But I'd forgotten  
about it, so it's good to remember it. Parsons did the project?

best,
nan
Quoting George Myers <[log in to unmask]>:

> Back in 1999, after working in NYC's City Hall Park's, "first almshouse
> cemetery" which could be literally, the first cemetery of a "poorhouse" in
> that there were other charities prior, perhaps the distinction a public vs.
> a private vs. church vs. state (purity vs. danger) for Parsons, Inc., in the
> middle of a rehabilitation effort to restore the City Hall Park and to
> upgrade its security (bollards, stronger fence, etc., and paving stone with
> outlines of former structure locations in darker stone from excavation and
> cartographic research) in which I found in a planned location for a water
> fountain, two skeletons atop another, almost bare, except for a piece of
> what might have been a small wooden piece on one wrist what had been
> impressed with some material that had left an "archetypal" judeo-christian
> "tablets" outline. I have not been back there, it was closed since 9/11 and
> just recently reopened, (so to visit the Horace Greeley and Joseph Pulitzer
> monuments and other park uses), so the "fate" of the drinking fountain
> remains a mystery.
>
> I assisted the research of the "Cooper Square Urban Renewal" research, an
> area once to have decimated 25 blocks for housing projects in the early
> 1970s, reduced, in my research with Nancy Stehling, MS, RPA, to the parts of
> three blocks on Bowery and Houston streets (in NYC they say "how ston")
> which had shown on the maps as containing a Methodist and a Quaker cemetery.
> Just outside the study area are two marble vault cemeteries, the first
> non-denominational ones in the city and what may also be nearby, shown on
> one map, further down the Bowery from that intersection, a "Negro Burial
> Ground". As urban sites are often "pits within pits" on top of accumulated
> building and other efforts, we researched the history of the cemeteries and
> found they had been removed in the 1840s, from the "Oldest street in
> America" (Leo Hershkowitz, Encyclopedia Americana) in the neighborhood of
> New York's original "theater district" and later Yiddish theater district.
>
> We were not privy to any of the excavation that went on there, though I did
> watch city hearings on the subject of the demolition and heard a resident of
> one of the structures, noted Oxford-trained scholar and feminist Kate Millet
> speak. I would suggest that researchers be given some "heads up" on work or
> have the rumor mill continue to grind as this does. Or hire the locals.
>



Nan A. Rothschild

Research Professor
Barnard College
212 854-4315

Director of Museum Studies
Columbia University
212 854-4977