NYC Construction Workers Uncover a Couple of Crypts Full of Skeletons

Workers replacing a water main near Washington Square Park recently discovered pair of buried brick roofs. Turns out, they’d stumbled onto a pair of crypts, likely connected to a nearby church and dating to the late 18th or early 19th century.

That’s 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 Chrysalis’ Alyssa Loorya, the project’s principal investigator.

“You never know what you can find beneath the city’s streets,” she said at the site in Manhattan’s Greenwich Village neighborhood. “You bury people to memorialize them and these people were forgotten.”

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 bones—much of the park was once a Potter’s Field for yellow fever victims.