The Hidden Cemeteries of Congregation Shearith Israel

The 21st Street Cemetery in 2010

Tucked away between brick buildings and protected by brick-and-stucco walls, three tiny urban cemeteries hide from the casual passer-by.  They chronicle the history of the venerable Congregation Shearith Israel and sit as silent anachronisms in 21st century Manhattan.

The earliest surviving cemetery (the exact location of the first is unknown) dates to 1683 and sits on St. James Place near Chatham Square in Chinatown. 

The original 23 Spanish and Portuguese Jews fled the Inquisition, arriving in what was then New Amsterdam in 1654.  More than 300 years later, it is one of the oldest surviving historical sites in Manhattan.

The 21st Street Cemetery at the turn of the last century - from the collection of the New York Public Library

Greenwich Villagers know well the second Congregation Shearith Israel cemetery on West 11th Street off 6th Avenue.  This tiny triangle of land holds about 20 headstones, a fraction of those buried here when the cemetery was a much larger square burial ground.  Burials began here in 1805 when Greenwich Village was far from Manhattan to the south and the surrounding area was rural countryside.  By 1830, however, the city's grid plan was taking place and West 11th Street cut through the plot.  The majority of the deceased were disinterred and moved north to the new cemetery on West 21st.

above photos show the 11st Street Cemetery in 2010

The Congregation established the final cemetery on West 21st Street just west of Sixth Avenue.  About 150 headstones survive here; however with the demolition of the row of buildings on 20th Street allowing weather conditions into the previously sheltered plot, the stones are quickly eroding away.  Inscriptions in Hebrew, Spanish, Portuguese or English which were astonishingly crisp a decade ago are now all but illegible.

Gates of the 21st Street Cemetery in 2011

Opened when the disturbed burial plots from 11th Street were relocated, the last interment here was in 1851, just before the 1852 law  making burials in Manhattan illegal.   These three incredible, hidden cemeteries stand in silent testimony to a rich yet harsh 300 year history of Jews in New York.

photographs by the author

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The Sash Maker's House - 17 Grove Street

Not necessarily one of the most important structures in Greenwich Village, this one is definitely one of the most visually impressive and one of the most photographed.  The residence is rare because of the 1866 fire laws that outlawed wooden structures in New York City in 1866 -- no doubt partly due to the Great Fire of 1835 that wiped out much of lower Manhattan. 

William Hyde was a window sash maker in 1822 when he built his two-story home and with his quaint wooden workshop behind it (more easily seen in the black-and-white photo below).  As amazing as the fact that the house survived intact is that the workshop did too.

17 Grove Stret in 1936 -- photo NYPL Collection

In 1870 the third floor was added and what was no doubt a prim Federal eave-line gained a modestly decorated Victorian trim board with machine-cut ornamentation and roof brackets.  The house eventually declined and, as seen in the 1936 photo, gained boarders and a fire escape.  As was common in those pre-air conditioned days, bedding is being aired out of the upstairs windows. 

Most likely at the time of the third floor addition, the oddly sized windows in the staircase hall (above the entrace door) replaced the originals.

The little sash maker's shop has gone through several lives, as well; becoming a private residence, a tea room (about the time of the 1936 photo), and currently a residence again.

In 1987 the house was purchased for $1.1 million and beautifully restored as a private home again.  The Greek-Revival inspired doorway ties nicely with the 1870 cornice; however the understated Federal doorway seen in the 1936 photo is original to the two-story residence. 

No one refers to 17 Grove as "The Hyde House" or any other such tag we're accustomed to with vintage homes.  Instead it's "that wooden house on the corner."

Call it what you will, it's a beauty.

non-credited photographs taken by the author

And They All Lived Together in the Crooked Little House -- 121 Charles Street

What's better than knowing something about New York that hardly any New Yorkers know?

Hidden behind an ivy-covered wall at the corner of Charles Street and Washington Street in Greenwich Village is one of the most unexpected structures in the city.  A tiny clapboard farmhouse, it has a side yard, a miniature driveway, and hardly a right angle to be found.

This crooked little house looks as though it had been sitting there watching the Village grow up around it for 200 years.  In fact, it is a relatively recent resident of the neighborhood.

Originally located at York Avenue and 71st Street, the little house became surrounded by tenement buildings until it was no longer visible from the streets.  Interestingly, this is not the only farmhouse in Manhattan so disguised.  A similar little house in the Hell's Kitchen neighborhood between 38th and 39th Streets off 9th Avenue is now temporarily visible after 19th century tenements and commercial buildings were pulled down in 2009.

During the Depression years, the Glass family, who had owned the property for decades, opened a tea room in the house.  By the 1940s, according to The New York Times, it was Healy's Dining Room.

The wooden house was leased to children's author, Margaret Wise Brown in the late 1940s and early '50s.  Among her most popular works is Goodnight Moon.  

In 1965 the Glass family sold the property to the New York Roman Catholic Archdiocese.  The following year, its tenants, Sven and Ingrid Bernhard, faced a problem.  The Archdiocese planned a home for the aged on the site.  The quirky little house that the Bernhards called Cobble Court (along with surrounding tenement buildings) was slated for bulldozing. 

The couple was successful in purchasing the house, but had to relocate it to make way for the Mary Manning Walsh Nursing Home.  The Bernhards purchased the 3,600-square-foot lot on Charles Street and in the pouring rain on March 5, 1967, the entire house (including the cobble stones from the courtyard) was packed up on a flatbed and moved.

Not long afterward, a little girl peered out of the car window as her father drove past 121 Charles Street.  She never forgot the fairy tale house behind the wall.  Nearly two decades later, she stumbled across it while roaming Greenwich Village with her husband.  There was a FOR SALE sign on the gates.  But not for long.

Suri Bieler and her husband Eliot Brodsky gently restored the tiny lopsided house.  When their son came along, they sympathetically extended the house with such compassion to the original structure that even the windows are crooked, earning them an award from the Greenwich Village Historical Society.  

In 2014 the property was listed online as a "potential development site."  It triggered an explosion of preservationist outcry.  It all turned out to be for nothing, as the property was not, in fact, for sale and is protected within the Greenwich Village Historic District.

Today, the side yard is peaceful and idyllic with flowering shrubs and a lush lawn.  A 1920s style garden seat and a birdhouse that is a scale version of the crooked little house completes the picture.   A one-of-a-kind house, this one barely escaped the bulldozer and is a wonderful find on a Village stroll.

non-credited photographs taken by the author

Madison Avenue circa 1910. I love this shot.

I found this shot yesterday to show the De Lamar mansion (far left) looming over the J. P. Morgan residence (in the middle of the photograph) among the wonderful photos in the New York Public Library collection.  The more I studied the photo the more I fell in love with it.

Last night I emailed my friend Paul the shot, knowing he understands my peculiar obsession with everyday social history, especially in New York.  Shots like this intrigue me because they are, quite literally, an instant in time frozen for us to see.

There on the corner of 36th Street and Madison Avenue are two little neighborhood girls -- girls living a quite privileged existence at home with private teachers and nurses and maids  -- roller skating past the mansion that in a few years J.P. Morgan would raze to build his private library.  A century ago those little girls enjoyed a spring day under a small tree in blossom without a care in the world, captured forever by the camera.

Notice that all the draperies are pulled in the three great houses.  Sunlight was known to be the greatest threat to the rich fabrics and carpets in those parlors and bedrooms.  So to preserve their fine upholstery, wall coverings and linens, the interiors of the New York mansions were always dim and, I would think, gloomy.  Only on Christmas Day would the wealthy Manhattanites pull open their draperies and illuminate the interiors so passing common folk could get a once-a-year peek inside the great homes.

Paul has the idea that the woman and man on the sidewalk between the two brownstones are having a not-so-happy exchange.  Hard for me to tell.  But I especially love the Little Lord Fauntleroy outfit on the boy running north towards 37th Street.  If you thought those fashions were only in the movies, think again!

There is a quiet, slow pace to the photo.  Here a commercial covered cart shares the block with the high-class carriage complete with liveried coachmen in silk top hats.  It was a time before automobiles and one-way streets and traffic.

And when I study that photograph, I wonder what Mrs. Morgan was doing inside that residence when the camera clicked.  Was Alice De Lamar at home in her French chateau on 37th Street?  And where was the man with the parcel going so quickly?

A very common moment, captured forever, making it extremely uncommon and precious.

The Old Ladies Come Down

When you live in Manhattan you're judged, partially, on the view from your apartment.

So when I moved from my 32nd-floor apartment with its million-dollar vistas of the Hudson River, the George Washington Bridge, and uptown Manhattan to my new fourth floor condo overlooking the backsides of two decrepit 19th century brownstones, I rapidly purchased wooden-slatted blinds and kept them pulled down and only slightly tilted open -- just enough to let in the sunlight but not enough to draw attention to the "view."

The brownstones faced onto 23rd Street, between 6th and 7th Avenues on the south side of the street. The glory days of those old ladies were long past. I had seen them from the street and dated the to the late 1880s or 1890s.  Long ago the stoops had been removed and storefronts were added on street level.  Little remained that would let the passerby know these had once been homes.

The backyards, once green and planted with flowers and herbs, were built over with brick and concrete extensions for the commercial establishments that had taken over the street level floors early in the 20th century. On the black-painted rear brick walls hung rusted fire escapes and heavy iron security shutters.

Friends came over for cocktail parties and Christmas dinner -- as they were drawn to the windows I'd whisk them away. "Oh! Did I show you the pictures from Maine?"

A friend from Florida remarked that I had purchased an apartment that was Lisa Douglas-worthy.  Unfortunately the view from the living room was the urban "Green Acres" equivalent.

Then, a year after moving in, I noticed changes. The windows were boarded. Then unboarded.

They were preparing to tear down the old houses.

Coming home each night and looking out at the progress was like watching a slow-motion time lapse film. There was no heavy equipment involved in the dismantling, the workers crawled over the buildings like ants with hand tools.  So daily there would be only a little less of the structures. And daily I could see a little more into them.  I was fascinated; first by the heavy hewn beams that emerged and the lathe work that had been hidden there for a century and a half. It was nothing that would excite most people, but to me it was like architectural forensics.

Daily as I passed them on my way to work, I watched the progress from 23rd Street. In the uppermost windows the original solid-paneled shutters were still in place. I imagined the original builders choosing the warm, walnut panels.

Then one morning I looked out to see that the parlor floor was exposed in the building nearest mine. There on one wall was one of the heavy, ornate brackets that had once held up the archway between the parlor and dining room. Astonishingly, it was still there.

And in the dining room wall was an arched niche.  These two details, along with traces of the crown molding where the ceiling once was, told me I was wrong in dating the houses. They were earlier--from the mid-19th century.  I imagined the thrill those first housewives felt on moving day.  The fresh smell of paint.  The new draperies and carpets.

What originally sat in that niche?  A statue?  An urn?  Whoever built that house had sat in that very parlor and read about Lincoln's assassination in the newspaper.  How many Christmas trees stood there?  How many bodies were laid out in that parlor?

The houses continued to come down very slowly.  Little by little I could see more of the second house. Another niche mirrored the one in the first dining room.  And one morning, passing by on 23rd, I stopped to gawk at that the second house. The front wall had come down on the second floor. The entire archway was still there.  The staircase in the entrance hall still clung to the wall, although the banister was gone. I wondered what the newel post had looked like.  Undoubtedly walnut or mahogany. Possibly rosewood.  It was like mentally walking into the house.

Through the decades those stairs had felt the brush of voluminous Civil War period skirts and 1890s bustled dresses. Men in 1920s boaters were followed by 1960s bell bottoms. The ghosts of a century and a half were being released into the Manhattan air.

Bit by bit the houses melted to the ground. The last section of paneled wainscoting, never painted, clung to a wall a story above the dirt lot where the houses had stood. A day later it had disappeared.  And now the lots look almost exactly as they did in the 1860s before the first bricks were laid. The same dirt that was there then awaits another structure.

Two more pages of New York history are gone, remnants of a 23rd Street that is inconceivable to 21st century Manhattanites.

Tomorrow a new page starts.