Workers replacing a water main near Washington Square Park recently discovered pair of buried brick roofs. Turns out, theyâd stumbled onto a pair of crypts, likely connected to a nearby church and dating to the late 18th or early 19th century.
Thatâs according to the AP:
One of the roughly 15-by-18-foot crypts was clearly disturbed, with the skeletons and skulls of between nine and 12 people pushed into a corner while more than a dozen stacked wooden coffins can be seen in the second one, said Chrysalisâ Alyssa Loorya, the projectâs principal investigator.
âYou never know what you can find beneath the cityâs streets,â she said at the site in Manhattanâs Greenwich Village neighborhood. âYou bury people to memorialize them and these people were forgotten.â
The plan is to reroute the water main, while experts try to trace who precisely these bones belonged to. Conveniently, the project was already working with the firm Chrysalis Archaeological Consultants, thanks to a different set of bonesâmuch of the park was once a Potterâs Field for yellow fever victims.
Anyway, New York City is a layer cake made of ghosts.
Contact the author at kelly@jezebel.com.
Image via AP.
