No Markings On These Graves

The alleged burial place of the Brinkerhoff family.

By Ellen Thompson

Pushing through overgrown weeds and decaying shrubbery, those who enter, walk upon the unmarked souls.

The seemingly uninhabited chunk of unkempt land located at 69-63 182nd St. in Fresh Meadows, is indeed inhabited. For three centuries, 76 members of the Brinkerhoff family have settled into its soil. Unfortunately, not a single family member has had the honor of being acknowledged or memorialized – all 76 plots are void of a mere tombstone.

It’s likely that if you told a passerby of those who lie deep beneath the ground, they’d scoff, but according to deed records, the property does hold a cemetery: the Brinkerhoff cemetery.

With over 5 million people buried in Queens, most with the benefit of being acknowledged, historians say. There are hundreds of thousands who haven’t been recognized, and it wasn’t until just a few years ago that the Brinkerhoffs came to light.

The property’s supposed owner, Alexander Spivak of Commercial Source Real Estate Management, who claims to have owned the property for several years, was looking to clear the shrubbery and overgrown weeds to transform the land into housing when he first heard of the 76 family members.

Spivak, who would not say from whom he had bought the land, doesn’t agree with the deed records. He, for one, scoffs at the idea that anyone could be buried on the land. But Stanley Cogan, a retired Queens Historical Society president, says otherwise.

For decades, Cogan has wanted the cemetery to be restored to its intended state as a burial ground where a memorial to the Brinkerhoff family could be placed.

As the Brinkerhoff cemetery debate continues, we are only left to question how many other souls could be hidden in Queens and where their unmarked bodies lie. With the borough once thriving farmland, there’s no telling. And if there is a possibility of building upon the Brinkerhoff’s resting place, just imagine whose spot you may truly be resting on as your head sinks into the pillow at night.