270-Year-Old Almshouse Discovered Under City Hall Park -- Daily Intel

Much of its cemetery is thought further to the north, under the watchful eyes of the Horace Greeley statue, where he sits in a chair, said to have said "Go west young man and grow up with the country". Nearby is a monument to Joseph Pulitzer from the days when reporters would clamber at the fence for a story from City Hall, "Newspaper Row" across the street. In 1999 some of the burials were found in the security and other improvements to City Hall Park under then Mayor Giuliani, who came out to see our work a couple of times. Most were treated where they were and left in situ, discovered in the upgrades to the City Hall Park, I recall then ~$17 mil?

Another ceremony was being conducted over the Federal cemetery, in 1999, the "Middle Passage" the term for the roughest part of Atlantic Ocean crossing, where those who hadn't survived were said to be dumped overboard, was commemorated, from a terrible time when slavery in the US had to be fought and Great Britain blockaded Africa from slave-running. The tribute left the Roberto Clemente State Park, at the Harlem River dockside and for every burial removed at the now African Burial Ground National Monument, a mile was traveled out into the Atlantic and there the sculpture commissioned, like two standing whale ribs, was dumped into the ocean. It was reported that small replicas of the sculpture were sold in the Caribbean.

I am glad the impact-directed and archaeological monitoring has finally found the "elusive" so-called "First Almshouse" though some of New Amsterdam's earliest settlers were youths from Holland's almshouses who stayed at Isaac Allerton's Warehouse, outside "The Wall". A monument was placed there over a century ago by The Mayflower Society, today, gone and the parking lot in the South Street Historic District, used by many to visit there and the tragedy of September 11, 2001. Allerton Ave. is an exit between the Bronx Wildlife Conservation Society (Bronx Zoo) and the Bronx Botanical Gardens on the Nation's oldest motor parkway, the Bronx River Parkway.

270-Year-Old Almshouse Discovered Under City Hall Park -- Daily Intel  By georgejmyersjr on 06/04/2010 at 4:04pm