New York Marble Cemetery

— behind 325-335 Bowery —

NY Marble Cemetery is a hidden half-acre garden bounded by 2nd and 3rd Streets, Second Avenue and Bowery. Built in 1830, it is NYC's oldest non-denominational cemetery. In contains 156 underground family vaults the size of small rooms, surrounded by 12-foot-high Greek Revival-style walls of Tuckahoe marble. There are no headstones for the 2,100 burials; only plaques on walls naming family purchasers and corresponding vault numbers.
Interments include NYC's second popularly elected mayor, Aaron Clark; NYU co-founder and abolitionist Congressman James Tallmadge; Mary Ann Delafield DuBois, NY Nursery & Child's Hospital founder; Erie Canal engineer Benjamin Wright; and New York Historical Society founder Luman Reed, who founded the city's first art museum in his home. Though burials slowed in the mid-1800s as families sought plots in more rural areas, a 1905 fundraising effort helped maintain the cemetery for the 20th century, just as rental events like weddings assure survival into the 21st.
This NYC Landmark, listed on the National Register of Historic Places, is open once a month during warm weather. Check marblecemetery.org for dates.

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