Death of a Cemetery
How an African-American Burial Ground in New York Became a Strip Mall
Cherry Lane, a peaceful-sounding street. And not even a street, but a “lane” recalling, indeed, cherry trees and bucolic settings where the sun shines all day and rain falls like cherry blossoms. So it’s fitting that a final resting place would be located here — Cherry Lane Cemetery, whose congregation belonged to the Second Asbury AME Church on Staten Island, NY. The land was deeded by John and Tabitha Merrill Blake in 1850, and it was the ideal place for both worship and eternal slumber.
The cemetery also went by, among other names, Second Asbury AME Cemetery; the African Burial Ground; and the Old Slaves Burying Ground. Those who prayed here and were buried here came from New York, New Jersey, and as far away as Maryland, Virginia, and the Carolinas. Many had been enslaved, even those from the North: New York didn’t outlaw slavery until 1827 and New Jersey was the last Northern state to do so in 1866. Other members were free people of color, especially the heartbreaking number of interred babies and children. Cemeteries aren’t just for the elderly.
But for unknown reasons, something went wrong. Or, more precisely, everything went wrong. For one, in the 1920s this idyllic spot went from sitting on quiet Cherry Lane to right in the middle of the bustle on what’s now Forest Avenue. Gone was the lane, replaced by an avenue, and with that came industry, stores, and property that was suddenly valuable. Think Pixar’s “Up” where Carl refuses to sell his beloved home while skyscrapers nearly squeeze him into oblivion. But where the property developers in “Up” were quick and aggressive, the ones in New York were more methodical and deceptive.
On this map dated 1927, the cemetery — in an area so over-zoned you can barely make out the “Cem.” in its name — was in commercial territory. It’s within the striped area. A black line was drawn around the cemetery borders to include it among the commercial properties on Forest Avenue. (For comparison, look left at The Lake Cemetery — it’s stripe-free.)
When Cherry Lane Cemetery became commercial property — as far as the city was concerned — is unclear, though based on what maps we do have, it may have been sometime between 1910 and 1925. Burials stopped in the early 1900s, yet if there was a cause-and-effect, no one knows. We also don’t know which person or entity decided to zone a cemetery commercial in the first place.
But let’s go back for a moment — back to 1850 when the land was deeded to Second Asbury. At that time, many of the congregation on Staten Island’s North Shore — specifically an area called Mariners Harbor —comprised oystermen and their families. They fished in waters like the Kill Van Kull and made a decent living selling oysters to Manhattan and points south. New York oysters were celebrated by the likes of Charles Dickens and were trendy among the rich and not-so. Big Oyster meant enough money could potentially have been collected to either build or maintain the Second Asbury Church, with some left over for burials.
At the same time, there were African-American oystermen on the South Shore who fished in Raritan Bay and had developed a bustling community called Sandy Ground. Unlike Cherry Lane, it had the good fortune to be in relative isolation, far away from developers. Their church and cemetery are still focal points of the area, even for those who no longer live nearby but visit every Sunday. (For more about Sandy Ground, read Joseph Mitchell’s terrific “Mr Hunter’s Grave” from a 1956 edition of The New Yorker.)
Yet this was also a time when raw sewage began to be dumped into New York Harbor. (Which is still happening today.) By the late 1800s, New York’s oyster beds were becoming too polluted to fish — it only takes a handful of typhoid cases to destroy an industry. And the African-Americans who lived in Mariners Harbor seem to have lacked the overall community support like those at Sandy Ground. These Sandy Ground oystermen were able to pivot, as they now say, to work in widely different industries without major disruptions to the area. In short: the people stayed.
But what kind of support did the Mariners Harbor inhabitants have? We’ll turn to William T. Davis, historian and naturalist, who in 1889 wrote “Homestead Graves” on one of his favorite subjects, Staten Island cemeteries. And though Davis had his own biases — he wouldn’t set foot in a Catholic cemetery— he does reference Cherry Lane and a tragic past that pre-dated even his visit.
“There are a few graves in a field … on Cherry Lane. A painted board and a broken headstone are the only monuments, the majority of the graves being marked by stakes, or the ordinary mounds. It is stated that some years ago a congregation of colored people elected a small church nearby, and maintained it for a time. But interest lagged; there came no revival, nor paint, nor putty, and bad boys threw stones at the windows. By and by, the [winners]on the evening of election day fastened a rope about the roof … and mid the cheers for an unregenerated soul the little church fell down. That portion of it that did not mysteriously disappear was piled on a cart in broad daylight, and otherwise well-seasoned, is said to have made most excellent material for fences.”
So think about it — your livelihood is disappearing, you’re Black in a time when many whites remembered Blacks as enslaved, and they tore down your church and turned it into fencing.
I believe this was the beginning of the end of Cherry Lane Cemetery. Since the church was destroyed, the congregation had to worship at churches of different denominations, as Second Asbury had been the only AME Church on Staten Island (Sandy Ground’s church is AME Zion). They began to spread apart. And for generations, the descendants, whether they knew it or not, would have to shoulder the burden of that night when “the little church fell down.” We have no photos of Second Asbury AME Church, no photos of the oystermen of Mariners Harbor, no photos of Cherry Lane burials. There’s only a partial list of the interred which may represent a fraction of the total number. Many who’ve had a longstanding history with Sandy Ground and even Mariners Harbor had never heard of Cherry Lane Cemetery, and heartbreakingly, neither have many whose family were buried there.
It’s now the 1950s.
In the words of someone who, as a child, had seen the forlorn Cherry Lane Cemetery: “to call it overgrown would’ve been an understatement.” There was a cemetery board, who were the descendants of the interred, but years of that burden had taken their toll. The graveyard was called an eyesore, and the city knew no one would complain if an eyesore was leveled. And if this land were actually a cemetery, where were the headstones?
William T. Davis has an answer for that:
“The field was still used for a burying ground after the church was gone, and lately a white board, bearing the following in neat black letters, was placed over the road: In Memory, Aaron Bush. Born April 12th, 1842, Kings & Queens County, Virginia. Died August 2nd. 1889, aged 45 years, 4 months, and 2 days.
“[A] marble head stone is broken in two, and half of it lays near one grave and the remainder by the side of another, thus making it uncertain to which it belongs. The inscription reads: Augustin Jones, died February 18, 1873, aged 33 years.”
Any attempt at marking graves with headstones was ruined, so the practice stopped. That went for wooden crosses, too. But because we’re wired to define a cemetery as a place with headstones or markers, rather than simply a place where the dead are buried, no headstones meant no cemetery.
And here’s where City Hall did what it does best — death by taxes. They illegally seized the property, claiming it satisfied a tax debt of over $11,000. That’s about $122,000 today. It may as well have been $122 million. There are those who claim the board was to blame for not filing the correct paperwork — paperwork that would’ve declared this space a cemetery and therefore tax-exempt. I maintain that’s insulting and untrue. The fix was in, the property was commercial, and even if the correct paperwork had been filed — and don’t forget the board had the deed — the city wanted what it wanted. Who would blame anyone for not trying to fight City Hall?
Here’s what I believe doomed Cherry Lane Cemetery:
- It was in prime real-estate area during the post-WWII development boom
- It had no headstones or markers
- There were no witnesses to burials because the last burials had happened in the early 1900s
- The deed mentioned the property was to be used for a church but didn’t specify a cemetery
- The deed specified a board name, but the name had been slightly changed since then, which, according to the city, voided the agreement
- The cemetery was African-American
If this had been a white cemetery on Forest Avenue, it may not have lasted either, but I believe a certain amount of care would’ve been taken to move the remains, many which could’ve belonged to the ancestors of those who lived nearby. But this was not a white cemetery, and because it was proven in court that it was not a cemetery at all, the onus lay on no one to take care of the remains. We owe a debt of gratitude to the late Borough Historian, Richard Dickenson, whose tireless research on Cherry Lane Cemetery (among countless other cemeteries) left us with priceless information on the site. He had thought that the bones may have been brought to nearby Moravian Cemetery, but Moravian has no record of this.
If you Google “Cherry Lane Cemetery” or “Second Asbury AME Cemetery,” chances are you’ll come across Benjamin Prine. He was reportedly the last enslaved person born on Staten Island, to a woman whose name is (so far) unknown and a father whose surname may have been Perine, though Benjamin himself was owned at birth by Rev. Peter Van Pelt.
(It should be noted that a large number of Second Asbury AME’s congregation lived on Van Pelt Ave in Mariners Harbor. Today this includes Benjamin’s great-great grandchildren who are the latest in a long line of descendants who lived there. They did not know about Benjamin Prine or the cemetery, and definitely didn’t know about Peter Van Pelt. Van Pelt Ave is about a 1.5 miles from the cemetery.)
Benjamin married twice. His first wife was Diana DeHart — a lauded surname in both Black and white communities. His second wife, Caroline DeBero, was born in New Jersey and is buried in Cherry Lane — possibly with her parents, since her father, John DeBero, was the first board president.
Benjamin had at least six children, and lived a life that at times sounded like “The Secret Life of Walter Mitty.” He’s our greatest connection to Cherry Lane Cemetery and one of our greatest connections to Staten Island and American history.
Benjamin’s advanced age and renowned storytelling made him a local celebrity, and his death, on October 3, 1900, hit the AP and various wire services, where versions of his obituary were printed from Elmira, NY to Davenport, IA.
“His stories and historical events are household talk on Staten Island. The centenarian was a playmate of Commodore Vanderbilt. When he was ten years old Prine said he saw George Washington.” — Elmira Star-Gazette.
Benjamin also built fortifications against the British during the War of 1812. Several months ago, after word got out that I was making a documentary on Cherry Lane Cemetery, I was contacted by a woman who belonged to the Daughters of the War of 1812. She told me that Benjamin qualified as a veteran and they’d tried to put a marker at his grave, but had no idea where it was.
And that’s where we leave Benjamin Prine, Cherry Lane Cemetery, and the rest of those possibly still there. In 1954 the burial ground was bought at auction for $1,000, then sold in 1962, when gas tanks were sunk into the ground, the land was paved over, and the cemetery became a Shell station. In the mid-1980s it was sold again, to a family who turned it into the strip mall it is today.
This paved-over ground is why practically no one knew of its existence. It didn’t happen in the 1800s, it happened in the 1960s.
Whether Benjamin Prine and his family are now entombed under asphalt or discarded is unknown. I hope that soon we’ll be able to use the available technology to locate at least some remains. Perhaps Benjamin, perhaps not, but freeing those who remain under a parking lot is our goal, and not a lot to ask. If the city can take the cemetery, the city can give it back. And up until 2018 the New York City Planning Commission still listed it on their site as “African Cemetery.”
A final word from William T. Davis, whose prediction about Cherry Lane Cemetery has come true so far, but it doesn’t have to be forever.
“The existence of these graves will probably soon be forgotten.”
