The New Yorker:

How the “forever business” is changing at New York City’s biggest graveyard.

By Paige Williams

New York City was gridded for life, not death, and by the late eighteen-twenties there was no good place to put all the bodies. Burial grounds were brimming. New Yorkers walked around holding vinegar-soaked handkerchiefs to their faces, believing that “putrid miasmas” emanated from graveyards and killed people. Scientists were only starting to piece together that contaminated water, not flawed character, caused cholera; that smallpox probably originated in rodents; and that yellow fever was the vector work of the lowly mosquito, not the result of immigration or rotting vegetables. A case of yellow fever, a disease that inspired what one doctor called “great terror,” often started with a headache, followed by a high temperature, a slow heart rate, delirium, a sallow complexion, and bleeding from the eyes, nose, and gums. A telltale sign of imminent demise was “ropy mucous coffee-ground black vomit.” Sweet death: no relief. “The increment of the city” was overtaking one graveyard after another and exposing the dead to “violation in the opening of streets, and other city improvements,” David Bates Douglass, a prominent surveyor and civil engineer, wrote. Finding a solution was a matter of “great and urgent solicitude.”

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