Urban exploration may seem like a fairly recent pastime, an underground community of adventurers in search of ruins, abandoned buildings and forgotten tunnels lying underneath the cityscape. The only known photograph of Charles Hemstreet, public domain ![]() His name was Charles Hemstreet and he was perhaps New York’s first urban explorer. Our adventurer had just come across what was then, the abandoned Marble Hill Cemetery, New York’s oldest non-sectarian graveyard and of the smallest burial places in the city. So shut in by dwellings that to one who walks the near-by streets, unconscious of its existence, it is as completely lost as though it had never been.” ©Marble Hill Cemetery “Having gone so far, I made a discovery – amidst a solid mass of brick and mortar of the tenements, hid a long-forgotten cemetery. Our enterprising map maker found a way to get past the locked gate by spying an open tenement door, tiptoeing through and climbing over a back wall, where he found something remarkable. “I had noticed an iron gateway set in between two houses…cramped between the tenements…a gateway of a bygone day, tall with rusty bars of an ancient pattern…standing beside the closed gate with never a chink of broken space through which to peep at what was beyond.” From ‘Nooks and Corners of Old New York’, Charles Hemstreet, 1899 ©Marble Hill Cemetery Today, it is quite visible to passersby if not a little unknown back in the late 19th century it was overgrown, boarded up and hidden… The location marked on the map takes us to Second Avenue, between Second and Third Streets, to a small ornate, wrought iron gate set back from the street. “In this part of the city, the houses are so thickly bunched that not a foot is spared for even a bit of green, and if a few blades of grass struggle out from between the brick-paved courts, they are ruthlessly ground out of existence by heavy shoes, as if they were some poisonous and hurtful thing.” The Bowery Slum, ©Jacob Riis The man who made the map picks up the tale : ![]() ![]() Walking down the noisy Bowery, it is hard to imagine silence reigning anywhere, just as it must have been when the map was drawn back in 1899. We’re on the trail of this hidden graveyard in the midst of Manhattan’s bustling East Village. From ‘When Old New York Was Young’, Charles Hemstreet Like a pirate’s map of old, it has an ‘X’ marked on it, but this map marks the spot of buried treasure of a different kind – a long forgotten and abandoned graveyard. We are exploring New York City with an old hand drawn map that bears the mysterious legend, ‘Where Silence Reigns.’ Roughly sketched out over a hundred and twenty years ago, it shows just four streets.
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