Where So Many Get Eternal Rest

By Matt Hampton

At lot 14 in Flushing Cemetery, Japanese Maples hang low over old headstones, shading the names and dates of Queens residents long dead.

At the border between Brooklyn and Queens in the Cemetery of the Evergreens, the headstone of John Huen, dead since 1902, is overgrown with moss, which looks natural on a headstone carved in the shape of a tree trunk. Huen’s name has nearly faded completely, but the marker will maintain its distinctive shape for centuries.

At Machpelah Cemetery just a few hundred yards from the Jackie Robinson Parkway, a stone woman sobs eternally on the grave of Harry Houdini, who could escape everything but his eternal rest.

The graves of Beth Olom are weathered, yet resolute.

In Queens, where the dead outnumber the living by a two-to-one margin, these scenes are commonplace. On any given day in the borough, the stories of the dead can be read off of plaques and stones neatly arranged one, after another, after another.

Markers come in a myriad of shapes: doves, scrolls, urns, hearts, boulders, cobbled stones, logs, bibles, obelisks. Graves have fences and flagpoles and photos laser-printed to last through wind and weather.

People leave stuffed animals and flowers, wreaths and plastic jugs (either filled with drinks or empty), hats and toys.

The trees leave acorns or pinecones, birds leave feathers, and depending on the season Mother Nature could leave just about anything, but ultimately the cemeteries of Queens are famous not for what makes them different but what makes them the same.

An average-sized headstone, composed of granite, weighs about 625 pounds. Taking into account the 5 million “permanent” residents of Queens, the weight of the monuments in the borough is most likely well over 300,000 tons, even accounting for unmarked graves.

Passing from the highway or looking from the window of a subway car, the cemeteries of Queens are a pin cushion of old monuments and statues. The grounds themselves are nearly choked in lots with standing-room-only. The people buried in the borough aren’t the only ones affected by overcrowding.

A map of the area reveals that the cemeteries, concentrated in areas near the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway and on either side of the Jackie Robinson Parkway, muscle against each other for room, sometimes erecting fences and hedges to demarcate the distinction between properties.

The headstones at Flushing Cemetery are almost as beautiful as the trees or the music played by one of its most famous residents.

The city of New York has had more than 325 cemeteries historically, with Queens representing a large chunk of that number. The borough owes it’s propensity for burial grounds to the passage in 1847 of the New York State Rural Cemetery Act.

The legislation, passed in an effort to prevent Manhattan from becoming overburdened with its dead, allowed for the establishment of commercial cemeteries outside of the city. As a result, Queens and Brooklyn both became prime real estate for New Yorkers who had given up the ghost.

Part of the language of the Rural Cemetery Act stated that no one company was allowed to own more than 250 acres of burial plots per county. As a result, property along the border between Brooklyn and Queens turned into the huge burial grounds so familiar to residents today.

Queens is the final resting place of millions of New Yorkers, from Mae West to Louis Armstrong. Cemeteries that dot the borough like the clustered spots of a Dalmatian are filled with their individual stories, some known, some still hidden, buried treasure beneath the soil.