Halloween occasions this tour of Trinity Church Cemetery in Upper Manhattan led by Columbia Community Scholar Eric K. Washington, an authority on Gotham’s eventful past buried beneath Manhattan’s only still-admitting cemetery. Established in 1842, this 24-acre greensward first laid out by James Renwick, Jr. — and later improved by Calvert Vaux — is on the National Register of Historic Places. Its roster of permanent residents and permanently dispossessed — as those of its lost Colored Orphan Asylum Ground — underscore the cemetery as a microcosm of the socially complex living world at large. Notable burials on this tour may include John James Audubon, naturalist; Cadwallader D. Colden, New York City mayor and abolitionist (whose grave Eric rediscovered for Trinity Archives); Laura Brevoort, masked ball hostess extraordinaire; Madame Eliza Jumel, adventuress; John Jacob Astor, merchant; Clement Clarke Moore, poet; Caroline Astor, doyenne of Gilded Age polite society; Rita de Acosta Lydia, American beauty of Belle Epoque Paris; and Mercedes de Acosta, lesbian paramour of some of the most important women of the 20th-century.
All tours are Eastern Time.
Tour