A Manhattan park built over a burial ground
Union Square in New York City was a potter's field from the late 1790s, holding the city's poor and unclaimed dead, including yellow fever victims near where the George Washington statue now stands. An estimated 20,000 bodies remain beneath the park, which became a public square after surveyors carved it out of farmland in 1811.
A burial ground became the city's busiest square
Union Square is a park and historic intersection in Manhattan, built on ground that once held the city's dead. Before it was a square at all, this land served as a potter's field, a burial ground for the poor and the unclaimed. Archaeologists found evidence of those graves when they dug here in the 1990s. Some estimates put the number of bodies still under the park at more than 20,000. Hundreds more came from a yellow fever epidemic in the 1790s, when the sick died faster than the city could name them. Many of those burials were likely never moved when the city built over the ground.
By 1811, surveyors planning Manhattan's street grid hit a problem at this spot. Broadway and the old Bowery Road came together here at an awkward angle, too sharp to build on cleanly. The planners carved out a square instead, first called Union Place. It stretched from 10th Street up to 17th, far bigger than the park people know today. City officials soon complained it was too large, and in 1814 the state cut it back to 14th Street on the south.
The real shaping of the square came from one man, Samuel Ruggles, a banker who was also developing Gramercy Park nearby. In 1831, he convinced the city to rename the grounds Union Square and square off its edges. Ruggles leased the surrounding lots, paved the streets, and built himself a house facing the park. The square opened to the public in July 1839, fenced in, with a fountain fed by the new Croton Aqueduct arriving in 1842.
The ground under the eastern edge of the square, at 69 East 17th Street, carries its own long record. The county's property files show a building there dating to 1800, built not long after this land stopped serving as a burial ground and before the square took its current shape. The lot runs close to four acres, far larger than a single city building usually holds, tying it to the wider development that went up around Union Square as Samuel Ruggles and others built out the neighborhood in the decades after 1831. It passed, like the rest of the blocks ringing the park, into private hands as the square turned from farmland and graves into one of Manhattan's busiest addresses.
The statue of George Washington went up in the square in 1856. It shows Washington on horseback, marking the day he led troops back into the city after the British left in 1783. It stayed the oldest sculpture in any New York City park. Lincoln followed in 1868, cast by the same sculptor, Henry Kirke Brown, holding a copy of the Emancipation Proclamation. Frédéric-Auguste Bartholdi cast a bronze of the Marquis de Lafayette for the square, dedicated on July 4, 1876, the country's hundredth birthday.
The square filled with crowds for reasons beyond statues. In 1864, the U. S. Sanitary Commission held its Great Metropolitan Fair here, raising money for Union soldiers during the Civil War. The year before, Andrew Jackson's funeral procession had passed through on its way uptown. Abraham Lincoln's did the same in 1865, moving up Broadway and through the square.
By the 1880s, the square had turned into something closer to a stage for ordinary workers. On September 5, 1882, more than 10,000 of them marched through in what is now counted as the first Labor Day parade in American history. Construction on Lüchow's Restaurant, a German beer hall that would feed the neighborhood for decades, began that same day.
The square became the city's loudest open-air platform in the new century. Anarchists, socialists, and union organizers used it as a meeting ground. In 1911, garment workers marched here to mourn the 146 people killed in the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire. In 1934, during the Depression, 3,000 unemployed New Yorkers gathered to protest the city's relief efforts.
The physical park changed too. Subway construction tore it apart and rebuilt it in 1928. Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux had already reshaped it once, in 1872, stripping out the old fence and hedges to open the square for mass gatherings. In the 1920s and 1930s, workers straightened the paths, built a colonnaded pavilion, and raised the Independence Flagstaff, a memorial to the signing of the Declaration of Independence.
The square kept drawing crowds for new causes. The first Earth Day festival in the country took place here on April 22, 1970. In 1976, the Union Square Greenmarket opened, giving farmers a place to sell produce directly to the city, and helping pull the neighborhood out of a rough stretch. In 1997, the federal government named Union Square a National Historic Landmark, citing its long record as a gathering place for American labor and protest.
Union Square today holds a farmers' market, a subway station, and a handful of 19th-century statues, over ground that once buried the city's unclaimed dead.
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