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.