The Banished Children of Eve (82 page)

It was not until we reached the halo of a streetlamp at the fringes of the fields that our anabasis came to a halt. Delighted with our safe return, we joked and laughed, pretending we had never been frightened at all, and I, quite proud of my find, held it up for the others to see. There, in the glow of gaslight, Ken Curtin, a tall red-haired lad who claimed to be Welsh but whom we mockingly accused of being Irish, noticed a clump caught in a fracture at the thick end of the bat. He reached up and pulled it loose. He held it for a moment in his hand. Horror crossed his face. “My God!” he said with alarm. “This seems a piece of skull and human hair!” Suddenly the shadows filled with Yorkers. Ken dropped the bat, and we resumed our race.

Upon
reaching home I informed my father what we had found, and he, after promising retribution for my disobedience at being where he had forbidden me to go, went off to fetch Sheriff Eisman. Together they went and retrieved the bat. What we had taken for a fragment of human scalp they discovered was a piece of tree bark with moss upon it. Yet after careful examination, they speculated that the bat may well have been the deadly instrument employed in the fearsome murder in the fields.

I expected no reward for making such a find, but hoped, perhaps, that because of it my father might forgo the punishment he had promised. I hoped in vain. That night, as he prepared to put the strap to me, he said, “Sin is sin, and as it is written ‘Thou shalt not kill,' so it is written ‘Honor thy father and thy mother.'” I learned my lesson well. The perpetrator of the murder, however, was never found.

*       *       *

In all the years after, there never was heat like that summer. My grandfather blamed it on the war. The same heat had oppressed his boyhood home in Konigsberg, he said, the summer after Napoléon's victory at Jena. Heat or no, the murder in the Elysian Fields brought the cold presence of death into our midst. “What is the world coming to?” was the question most frequently upon our elders' lips, and almost within hours of the murder, the infamous and awful draft riots that commenced in New York City seemed to give them their answer:
The world is coming to ruin.

The riots were the second memorable moment of that July, and though, thank God, our town was spared any of the carnage and savagery that were commonplace across the river, the blood-red fires that rose up in the night sky and the terrified exiles who landed on our shore were awful reminders of how close we were to the volcano. That knowledge inspired formation of a local defense force that stood guard throughout the week. On Wednesday and Thursday, the first units that had been hurried back from Gettysburg to put down the insurrection arrived by rail. The town cheered lustily as the heroes of the Union boarded the ferry to cross the Hudson, and we boys watched in awe and amazement as these sun-burnished giants entered the terminal. We knew for sure the nefarious Yorkers were about to meet their match!

It was
Sunday morning of that infamous week, when the soldiers had done the work we had expected them to do, that the loudest echo of the riot was heard in our town. As was his custom, my father was late in dressing for church. The whole family sat waiting in the parlor when Sheriff Eisman arrived and told my mother he needed Father right away. My father came downstairs, and the Sheriff informed him there was trouble in the fields and summoned him to join a detachment of citizens on its way to deal with it. With no more explanation than that, off they went, and I, pretending I could not hear my mother as she shouted for me to come back, trailed behind.

The Sheriff and his men proceeded directly to the area of the fields occupied by the playing diamonds of the baseballers, their sport, though the Cooperstown Chamber of Commerce may loudly protest otherwise, a homegrown product of Hoboken. That day the fields presented a most remarkable sight. Everywhere you looked were the crude tents of pathetic families of Negroes who, fleeing the violence directed at them in New York City, had set up impromptu camp.

Now, however, the teams of baseballers had approached, intent upon their Sunday sport, and the Negroes had refused to move. It seemed the madness across the river was about to spill over, and a riot to ensue! The Sheriff's men immediately imposed themselves between the would-be combatants, but the exchange of words between the players and the refugees grew more heated and threatening until a strikingly attractive Negress of the lightest hue stepped forward. In a voice so rich and dramatic it might well have been found upon the stage, she averred that the players would soon have their fields back.

“Give us this single day of peace,” she declaimed. “We shall use it to gather our possessions and tend to those who have been hurt, and then we shall leave most gladly, shaking the dust from our feet.” When the grumbling of the baseballers continued, she drew a small pickaninny to her side and said, “You who call yourselves Christians, can you find it in your hearts to give this child a few hours free from persecution?”

The baseballers
stayed awhile longer, and some continued to protest the loss of their fields, but gradually they melted away and the Negroes were left in peace, guarded by a small number of the Sheriff's men. The next day, as the Negress had promised, her people were gone and were never seen again.

—Kurt Bonenstedt,
The Town Across the River: Hoboken as It Was
(New York: The Metropolitan Press, 1935)

In its early years, New York was notoriously inhospitable to the dead. The Dutch and English settlers routinely desecrated the burial sites of the Native Americans. They ripped open the earth to plant crops and sink foundations, and had about as much regard for the bones and bodies they came across as for the dirt they found them in, maybe less. Soon enough, many of the original settlers met the same fate as the Native Americans they had displaced. As the city began its relentless march up Manhattan Island, tombs, monuments, and family plots once situated in wastelands, or on hilltops, or in the corner of some green field became part of a bustling, hurry-up metropolis. Some early graves were probably respectfully removed. Others, more likely, were simply obliterated.

Gradually, life improved for the dead. Churchyards and formal cemeteries well north of the settled areas (a development mightily encouraged by the Rural Cemeteries Act of 1847) offered a secure resting place. But the dangers to the dead did not entirely abate, especially with the rise of a professional medical establishment and its voracious appetite for human specimens for examination and dissection. New York Hospital, for example, did a wholesale traffic in cadavers, permitting its students an endless variety of opportunities for sawing, chopping, cutting, slicing, dicing, and otherwise practicing the medical arts of the time. The practice was so extensive that in 1788 there was an attack on the hospital by a disturbed and outraged citizenry. The militia was called out and ended the affair, but not before it added five more citizens to the supply of the city's dead.

In death
as in life, it has always been advisable to be rich instead of poor. New York's indigent dead learned this the hard way in the mid-1820s, when the city fathers reconsidered the placement of the municipal potter's field. In 1797, a piece of property outside the inhabited region of Manhattan had been set aside for the purpose and, in an early example of mixed land use, was also designated for the performance of public executions. In the interim, however, the city had undergone one of its periodic growth spurts (a horizontal expansion that would later turn vertical), and the necropolis of paupers, which by this time contained at least ten thousand souls, stood squarely in the way of progress. For well over a generation, here was where the city had dumped the nameless victims of cholera, yellow fever, and typhoid, as well as drunks, prostitutes, criminals, and other of the disreputable dead. It wasn't exactly an inducement to the respectable classes to settle nearby. But neither for the first time nor the last, the city's real estate developers and its public officials put their heads together and came up with a rewarding solution. The potter's field was closed, trenches were dug to let any buildup of gases escape, the rot of the dead was exposed to the air and elements. After a period of time, the potter's field was sealed up again, resodded, and reseeded, and a park was laid out there. Fed by a wondrously rich compost, the flowers and shrubs were soon abloom, and within a decade the new expanse of greenery dramatically boosted land values. The park was quickly surrounded by handsome, stately residences in the Greek Revival style, and in 1837 the neighborhood became home to the University of the City of New York, today's New York University.

Even wealth, however, has been no guarantee of eternal rest for the dead New Yorker, a lesson learned the hard way by the family of Alexander Turney Stewart, the Belfast-born merchant whom many credit with the invention of the department store. By 1848, Stewart was one of the most successful merchants in the city, and he built a grand new store at the busy corner of Chambers and Broadway, the Marble Dry-Goods Palace, which later served as the headquarters of
The Sun
and which still stands to this day.

In order
to build his Marble Palace, Stewart not only had to demolish Washington Hall, which stood on the site, but to dig deep into the earth to lay the foundations of the massive new edifice. This meant uprooting a part of the old Negro burial ground that Washington Hall had been built upon. There were those in the city who thought Stewart might insist the architects devise a way to leave the dead undisturbed. It was widely rumored that the ghost of the man who had built Washington Hall roamed the vicinity, loudly lamenting his decision to disquiet the bones of the Africans. He could find no peace, the ghost told those who took the time to listen.

Stewart scoffed at such an idea. With the levelheaded practicality of the Scotch-Irish, he brushed aside the cavils of the superstitious and went about his business. His immense success seemed to refute any notion of a curse. He prospered greatly, and in 1863 opened an even grander emporium between Broadway and Fourth Avenue. More than a store, Stewart's Cast-Iron Palace was a door to the future, the Gate of Heaven, the portal through which the masses passed from a world in which shopping was an everyday necessity into one in which it was a glorious activity, a carnival of choice, a cornucopia of pleasure.

The profits poured in. Stewart diversified. He purchased theaters and hotels. He became a close confidant of President Grant's. He built a home that cost the incredible sum of two million dollars. He filled it with a million dollars' worth of artwork. He purchased a large tract of land on Long Island and built a planned community on it, Garden City, and thus, along with consumerism, helped set in motion that other engine of the American Dream—suburbanization. And then, in 1876, he died.

He was laid to rest in the yard of St. Mark's-in-the-Bowery, the Episcopal church at Second Avenue and Tenth Street, in a ground-level vault covered with a marble slab that gave only the family name. But almost from the moment he entered the ground, the city abounded with rumors that he would find no rest. Why this was so is difficult to ascertain. As disturbed and violent a place as New York was in those years, with bloody incidents like the Draft Riots of 1863 and the Orangemen's Riot of 1871 exposing the city's vast netherworld of poverty, resentment, and ethnic hatred, the violation of burial sites and the ransoming of corpses were almost unheard of. Many rich and powerful New Yorkers, the potential targets for such acts, had died and were left to enjoy their quiet, unending sleep. Why wasn't Stewart? Perhaps it was because of where he was buried; not in the bucolic precincts of Green-Wood or Woodlawn, but on the very fringe of the city's vast caldron of seething slumdom. Or perhaps it had something to do with the curse that Stewart had ridiculed and disregarded. Who can say with certainty?

In any
case, on October 8, 1878, two and a half years after the merchant prince's death, the sexton of St. Mark's discovered that the marble slab above the crypt had been moved, though the grave itself was undisturbed. The church took precautions against the intruders' returning. The slab was moved to a new location and the real grave covered over. But the ghouls weren't fooled. A month later, on the evening after the temporary watchman had been dismissed, robbers uncovered the real grave, and removed Stewart's body. Stewart hadn't made it easy for them. Once in the crypt itself, the thieves had to unscrew the cover of a great cedar chest, cut through a lead box, and break open the copper coffin, a job they somehow performed without rousing any alarm in the densely packed neighborhood around the church.

Although they had no suspects, the police were desperate to take some action against the criminals who had violated the tomb, that sanctum sanctorum of Victorian propriety, so they pulled in anyone who was known to have expressed ill will against Stewart while he was alive. There were many: the small merchants he had undersold and put out of business; the clerks and seamstresses he had sweated and squeezed, frustrating all their attempts to unionize; the legion of petty thieves caught and arrested in the store, and prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law. Meanwhile, a small army of guards was hired to protect the resting places of those with names like Astor and Vanderbilt. But Stewart remained the only member of New York's golden circle of nabobs to endure involuntary resurrection.