Visitors to New York Marble Cemetery, at 41½ Second Avenue. According to its website, “the cemetery is generally open to the public on the fourth Sunday of the month from April to October, and on other days throughout the year.”
Visitors to New York Marble Cemetery, at 41½ Second Avenue. According to its website, “the cemetery is generally open to the public on the fourth Sunday of the month from April to October, and on other days throughout the year.” © Beyond My Ken/Wikimedia Commons

Competition for space in an ever-developing city isn’t only a problem for living New Yorkers; scarcity also troubles the dead. But where old housing, commercial, and cultural spaces may be obliterated to make way for the new, burial grounds alone hold the promise of permanence, thanks to a legal guarantee of undisturbed eternal rest. Educator and writer Allison Meier suggests the city’s cemeteries can be read as an index to its history, revealing growth spurts and shifting ideals about landscape, death, and design. Today, as space for interment within the five boroughs becomes ever more limited and expensive, and as concerns about environmental and spatial sustainability come to the fore, designers and cemetery stewards are beginning to envision new urban systems of death. When every inch is contested, how can space for contemplation and remembrance be preserved, even if space for “traditional” burial is not?

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In the 1852 Matthew Dripps map of Manhattan, a cluster of cemeteries (outlined in orange) surrounds the intersection of Second Avenue and Houston Street.
In the 1852 Matthew Dripps map of Manhattan, a cluster of cemeteries (outlined in orange) surrounds the intersection of Second Avenue and Houston Street. © David Rumsey Historical Map Collection