Transcript
Speaker: And then in 1851, you couldn't be buried beneath 86th Street.
Speaker: And considering that most people lived far south of 86th Street by then, that was a problem.
Speaker: And that gave birth to the Rural Cemetery Act.
Speaker: MUSIC PLAYS
Speaker: Hi everybody and welcome to another episode of the Glam Reaper podcast.
Speaker: I'm your host Jennifer Muldowney aka the Glam Reaper and I'm sitting here in the iconic Central Park in New York City in Manhattan and beside me I have an amazing guest all the way from the UK.
Speaker: You shouldn't fly here for this but Crombie is an incredible author and tour guide in New York City and she's going to tell us all about death and mayhem in New York City.
Speaker: Crombie, welcome.
Speaker: Hello.
Speaker: How are you?
Speaker: Very hot.
Speaker: It is very hot.
Speaker: It's a very hot day in Central Park.
Speaker: It is, and we were just discussing Celsius versus Fahrenheit.
Speaker: I will still stick to Celsius when anybody asks me.
Speaker: So will I. How long have you been in?
Speaker: Ten years.
Speaker: Same.
Speaker: Ten years next year.
Speaker: I refuse to say basil and tomatoes as well.
Speaker: Longitude.
Speaker: I have a problem with longitude.
Speaker: I haven't heard that yet.
Speaker: Longitude.
Speaker: Longitude.
Speaker: Longitude.
Speaker: But language does what it does.
Speaker: It does what it does.
Speaker: And today we're not talking about language.
Speaker: We are talking about death and mayhem in New York City, quite literally.
Speaker: So Crombie wrote a book that I've retained about 5% of the information from because it is an incredibly factual book.
Speaker: Super interesting.
Speaker: If you're into that sort of thing, you might not be.
Speaker: Not everybody's into Death and Mayhem, but I feel like anybody who listens to this podcast is definitely into it.
Speaker: And it is a really great book that talks about cemeteries, all the different families that have been involved in New York and done crazy things, right?
Speaker: Yeah, so... I learned a lot about the history.
Speaker: It's not a book about grief.
Speaker: No, no.
Speaker: It's a history book.
Speaker: It's a history book.
Speaker: So it's 400 plus years of the municipal management and in many cases mismanagement of death, going right back to the indigenous people in the late woodland period before Europeans start to arrive, following the traditions of immigrants.
Speaker: And ultimately how New York City is running out of space, because this is a city of, with the exception of the Bronx, it's islands that are running out of space.
Speaker: So that ties into what you do.
Speaker: Yes, I, disposal of bodies, legally, legitimately, is something that I am a part of.
Speaker: However, doing it illegally is not something we support.
Speaker: I talk about that as well.
Speaker: You do.
Speaker: She does.
Speaker: It's a really interesting book.
Speaker: It is full of information and facts.
Speaker: And if you're not a book reader, you should do one of her tours because those are also equally interesting.
Speaker: And not all of them are about death either.
Speaker: But for this particular episode, we are going to focus on death.
Speaker: It's New York City is a very fast Manhattan is a very fascinating place to be a part of.
Speaker: You've got this sprawling Central Park that we're sitting in here right now which is quite like the Phoenix Park in Dublin.
Speaker: With the dead.
Speaker: With the dead.
Speaker: Some of it.
Speaker: Oh yes.
Speaker: Seneca Village.
Speaker: See this is all the fun facts.
Speaker: It is the book is so interesting if you're into as I said this sort of thing and history at all even if you're not into death.
Speaker: and you're into history, it's such an interesting book because New York, even though most Irish and English people would come over here for shopping and that sort of thing, Times Square, New York City has so many of the most fascinating cemeteries in the world, I think.
Speaker: Especially when you read your book.
Speaker: It does and...
Speaker: The problem that Manhattan had was, one, you had a lot of epidemics, and people believed in the miasma theory, pre-germ theory, so people were very frightened, superstitious about cemeteries because of the germs that they had, and in some cases that was a real...
Speaker: thing because they'd be nightly burials at Trinity.
Speaker: There was also a water fountain just outside Trinity Church that would, the water would run through the dead before you drank it and you wonder why everybody had cholera.
Speaker: Lovely.
Speaker: But also the advancing grid plan meant that they had to get rid of, they had burial prohibitions so first of all you weren't allowed to be buried below canal streets,
Speaker: In 1823, then there was another burial prohibition union, Squett 14th Street.
Speaker: And then in 1851, you couldn't be buried beneath 86th Street.
Speaker: And considering that most people lived far south of 86th Street by then, that was a problem.
Speaker: And that gave birth to the Rural Cemetery Act in 1847.
Speaker: Wow, the Rural Cemetery Act.
Speaker: Okay.
Speaker: That basically meant that you could have, a lot of it was commercial burial grounds anywhere in New York State.
Speaker: And because they were more and more commercial, those...
Speaker: tethers to the church, to the synagogues became less so.
Speaker: And so burying people became more expensive, monuments to the dead became more personalized.
Speaker: But what happened is in what used to be Long Island in Kings, Queens counties, which is now Queens and Brooklyn, those cemeteries, the reason why it's called the Cemetery Belt, where the majority of them are, is they're all joined together on the border of Queens and Brooklyn.
Speaker: And the reason for that
Speaker: is that the 1847 Cemetery Act said initially it was 200 acres and then 250, that you couldn't have more than that amount of acres in one county.
Speaker: So they overlanded so that they could double their amount of acres and their tax-exempt real estate.
Speaker: Very clever.
Speaker: The cemetery belt is actually, I feel like until I experienced it, you don't actually, you kind of think, oh yeah, I mean, whatever.
Speaker: But when you're driving through Queens and going to the airport and stuff, it is actually wild.
Speaker: It's literally graves for as far as the eye can see.
Speaker: They call it the Borough of the Dead.
Speaker: Yeah, so the name of another walking tour company.
Speaker: no problem to them but you just said it like during covid during lockdown i lived out in queens and that's where i got my respite was i went running through the cemeteries while i was exploring them for 12 not consecutive but 12 eight hour days and because a lot of it's really difficult to get to and you don't want to get lost i did get locked in well i did
Speaker: Yeah, I missed the 4pm deadline.
Speaker: And some of them are in better condition than others because there's quite a lot that the descendants have gone.
Speaker: They've either moved away or they've just died out.
Speaker: So I think there's one Jewish gentleman looking after a lot of the older cemeteries from the mid-19th century that just the upkeep has gone.
Speaker: So you see some extraordinary things.
Speaker: You do.
Speaker: Well, I say you do.
Speaker: In the book and on your tours, what would you say, what's a story you can share with the listeners that is either exotic or a bit sort of downright crazy?
Speaker: What I touched on earlier with regards to yellow fever epidemics, which led to the first burial prohibition.
Speaker: So they took the dead of yellow fever and they took them to a place that was considered far north of the city, which is present day Washington Square Park.
Speaker: And the bodies are still beneath that.
Speaker: So there's about 20,000 dead.
Speaker: Welcome to New York, by the way.
Speaker: Do you love the ambulance?
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Is this what happens when you do anything live?
Speaker: The city.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Yeah, so the bodies tend to pop up.
Speaker: All the time.
Speaker: In my book, I call it the workman's burden.
Speaker: It's generally when they're doing a bit of plumbing.
Speaker: A lot of it's around the Washington Arch.
Speaker: Something will just sit up and the workmen will kick them back down.
Speaker: Or they'll take them to be analysed and then they'll be reburied.
Speaker: But from the late 1840s,
Speaker: or early 1850s to 1868 it was Randalls Island so the Potter's Field as they call it here shifted there and because of the advancing grid they got rid of a lot of those old cemeteries and they reinterred as in reburied people on Randalls Island
Speaker: and created a tumulus.
Speaker: It's basically a burial mound, so it's not signed, it's not.
Speaker: But there's, yeah, there's a quarter of a million dead.
Speaker: And the biggest quarter of a million.
Speaker: Wow.
Speaker: This field, Popper's Grave was 50th Street, and it was so, it was in such disarray that the local kids in the 1850s would just poke sticks at the dead, all these kind of skeletons sticking out.
Speaker: And they moved about 100,000.
Speaker: It's where the Waldorf Astoria is now.
Speaker: From Randalls Island, it moved to Hart Island, which is the biggest municipal potter's field in the world.
Speaker: There's well over a million people buried there, so that's just off the box.
Speaker: So wait, the Waldorf Astoria is sitting on a quarter of a million bodies?
Speaker: No.
Speaker: So the body, 100,000 have moved from there to Randalls Island, which is actually Ward's Island, but collectively call it Randalls Island because three islands joined together.
Speaker: So the Waldorf Astoria is sitting on what?
Speaker: Well, maybe there's a couple of leftovers.
Speaker: My God.
Speaker: That's it.
Speaker: You know, I was just at a funeral convention recently in Savannah, Georgia, which is like renowned as one of the most haunted places in the US.
Speaker: And one of the girls, shout out to Gary, God love her.
Speaker: She was terrified because she was full sure there was a ghost in her room and she ended up getting moved rooms.
Speaker: And we later found out that there was, in fact, a young man who I think he was from the military or something.
Speaker: And I think he was on a stag or something like that.
Speaker: And he ended up getting found in the vent.
Speaker: I mean, how do you get that drunk that you end up in a vent?
Speaker: I don't really.
Speaker: I'm sure you can imagine.
Speaker: I mean, I have no inclination ever to climb into tiny little boxed spaces when I'm drunk.
Speaker: That's the last place I want to be.
Speaker: But he did and was found.
Speaker: It might have been a prank.
Speaker: It might have been.
Speaker: Anyway, we don't know if it was him and if it was him, I hope he's resting in peace now, but we don't know.
Speaker: So a big thing in New York City when you arrive here, even if it's for the shopping and not for the graves, who even are you, is it's such a big city that people are always worried about robberies, whether it's your handbag getting robbed, the subway doors closing or busting in the streets.
Speaker: Or your dead relatives.
Speaker: Or your dead relatives.
Speaker: Because grave digging, grave robbing was huge in Ireland.
Speaker: Like Glass-Nemone Cemetery, the reason the huge walls are there is to kind of stop it.
Speaker: In the UK, there was those two famous lads.
Speaker: I have a terrible memory of their names.
Speaker: Was it Birkin?
Speaker: Birkin, that's it.
Speaker: And yeah, so like did that shenanigans go on here?
Speaker: The shenanigans went on here.
Speaker: 1788, you've got what is now called the African Burial Ground.
Speaker: And the free and black residents of New York City who could sign a petition did sign a petition and submitted it to the Common Council with regards to the nightly grave robbery that was happening there because it was an easy target because of racism.
Speaker: And the people who were stealing from those graves were student doctors.
Speaker: The interesting thing about that year, 1788, is it technically wasn't illegal to grave rob.
Speaker: But if you think about it, America gets its first president one year later.
Speaker: So these new states are still drawing up the laws and legislation.
Speaker: And I guess body snatching wasn't at the top of...
Speaker: those priorities.
Speaker: So the student doctors didn't have a cadaver providing service so they were plundering these cemeteries and that petition from what's now called the African Burial Ground that was submitted in February of 1788 and then two months later what used to be the New York hospital which is very near, was very near the African Burial Ground
Speaker: The story goes that there was an independent anatomy class and it was taught by a very noted physician.
Speaker: His name was Dr. Richard Bailey, who incidentally was the father of the very first American-born saint, Elizabeth Ann Seaton.
Speaker: See?
Speaker: I told you you'd learn a lot.
Speaker: I think she became a saint in 1975.
Speaker: She cured the blind.
Speaker: That's generally the miracle.
Speaker: That's the go-to miracle.
Speaker: But the story goes that one of his students was waving an arm outside of the classroom window and it wasn't his arm.
Speaker: It was a dismembered arm.
Speaker: There was a group of boys standing outside the window.
Speaker: One of them goes up to take a closer look.
Speaker: The student doctor tells the boy, this arm belongs to your dead mother.
Speaker: Probably just an off-the-cuff
Speaker: remark but the boy's mother had just died.
Speaker: Oh my god.
Speaker: Then the boy goes back to his father, the story goes, they dig her up and the coffin is empty and then a mob who are sick of all the grave robbery surround the New York hospital.
Speaker: Even Alexander Hamilton was trying to
Speaker: was trying to hold back the crowd.
Speaker: I think it was King's College that then became Columbia College.
Speaker: They dropped the name King.
Speaker: The student doctors were taken to a local prison for their own safety by the mayor.
Speaker: And the riot lasted about four days and there was something like 15 deaths.
Speaker: Wow.
Speaker: Every medical professional in the city was hunted down.
Speaker: And then immediately after the riot, the laws started to change.
Speaker: So that was 1788.
Speaker: 1789, it became illegal to grave rob.
Speaker: And then in 1790, you had the Crimes Act.
Speaker: And that meant that any murderer sentenced to death, their remains could legally be handed over to student doctors for dissection.
Speaker: That was followed by the Bone Bill.
Speaker: I think it was 1854.
Speaker: by John William Draper, who co-founded NYU Medical School, who weirdly is from my hometown.
Speaker: Wow.
Speaker: I thought I was a pioneer.
Speaker: I thought I was the first person in there to come to America, but no.
Speaker: And the Bone Bill kind of stipulated that you've got about two days to identify the dead, which basically related to vagrancy.
Speaker: And that passed by one vote,
Speaker: Oh, my gosh.
Speaker: So now you have to be either a donor or your next of kin gives the thumbs up.
Speaker: With regards to being a donor.
Speaker: Real life thumbs up.
Speaker: As of 2017, when you go to the DMV Department of Motor Vehicles, you have to apply for your state ID.
Speaker: You have to check yes or no with regards to being a donor.
Speaker: Whereas before you had the option to leave it blank.
Speaker: Wow.
Speaker: Mother of God.
Speaker: I mean, who, like, until I read your book, I mean, and listen, there's so much for us all to learn.
Speaker: There's nobody in this world who's perfect or has learned all the things, although I think you'd be coming close.
Speaker: You know, you work in this field for so long and, you know, you pick up things.
Speaker: And over here in the U.S., it's also very interesting because it's state by state and like individual countries.
Speaker: So learning about each one is...
Speaker: an intricacy of itself um but i have to say i learned so much reading your book it was fact after fact after fact um and i think that's probably it took me a long time to read it because it's so full of facts took me a long time to write yeah actually i was unemployed at the time so it took me about five months
Speaker: Unlike the current book, which is about two years.
Speaker: Oh, listen, too busy.
Speaker: Tell me about it.
Speaker: That's the exact same of my own books.
Speaker: This book has been in progress for I don't know how long.
Speaker: But what's your thoughts on Heart Island?
Speaker: I went over there pre-COVID.
Speaker: I really wanted to.
Speaker: I mean, they used to have Rikers Island prisoners digging the trench graves, but it used to be the New York City Department of Corrections, and now it's switched over to...
Speaker: to the parks department so you can go over there if you're obviously related to the dead they have a big turnover so for instance maybe a year after their death and you can afford to have them exhumed and buried or cremated elsewhere people will do that but now they've got this kind of macabre lottery so twice a month you can win a ticket to go over there and they've got these amazing
Speaker: buildings from the 1800s that were various psychiatric institutions and reformatory schools for naughty children.
Speaker: And I think they're about to demolish those buildings, which I'm kind of sad about because they have a lot of history, and turn it into some visitor's
Speaker: But initially, like when AIDS hit the city, they buried those people when they didn't know anything about the virus, far away from everybody else.
Speaker: And they did the same with COVID when it was sanitation workers, as opposed to Rikers Island prisoners who were digging their trench graves.
Speaker: It's crazy.
Speaker: I mean, it's wild to even think that that's,
Speaker: so close to us here in the city and like we're sitting here on the Upper East Side part of Central Park and just the differences in wealth in this city are just crazy and even when it comes to the death.
Speaker: They'd have the dead here.
Speaker: I've done some radar tests and that's because
Speaker: Ironically, Central Park was supposed to be egalitarian.
Speaker: It was supposed to be for all classes.
Speaker: But in order to do that, by eminent domain, they threw everybody out of this area, people who were either squatting here or living here.
Speaker: There was a lot of Germans and Irish here who were basically building the Croton Reservoir for the freshwater influx from Westchester.
Speaker: But there was also the very first established, mostly middle-class black people
Speaker: Settlement from 1825, which is now known as Seneca Village.
Speaker: I think that's in the West 80s.
Speaker: And yeah, they tariffed them all off, but they had churches and burial grounds.
Speaker: So there's still sensitive areas with the dead.
Speaker: It's such a highly populated city that, of course, there was going to be a history behind it all.
Speaker: But it really is great.
Speaker: And definitely check out, what's the name of the book again?
Speaker: Death in New York.
Speaker: Death in New York.
Speaker: I called it that because of, I was in an argument with my publishing company, I think they wanted to call it something like Life and Death in New York.
Speaker: No, Death in New York.
Speaker: It's because of Death in Venice, which was a book and then a film.
Speaker: Yes, yes, very good.
Speaker: And so Death in New York is one of...
Speaker: your books I've got a new one I'm trying to finish deadline is November okay and so that should be coming out next year and it's called the psychiatric history of New York everything kind of meets in the middle yes because a lot of those islands where the bed the dead were buried historically is also where they kept psychiatric institutions it is
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: And I have done the psychiatric tour and tell us about the tour.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: So fun.
Speaker: So fun.
Speaker: I mean, I'm interested in all that sort of stuff, but it's just interesting.
Speaker: I've always been interested in history.
Speaker: And we ended up in the pub.
Speaker: And we did end up in the pub because we're Irish and English and that's just the places we end up.
Speaker: We'll probably end up there today.
Speaker: But tell us that you do a couple of different tours here.
Speaker: Yeah, so the tour company is called Pure Finder.
Speaker: Pure Finder.
Speaker: I think P-U-R-E.
Speaker: Which has a meaning that I won't explain.
Speaker: It's kind of disgusting.
Speaker: It relates to London in the 19th century, but you can look at it what Pure Finder means.
Speaker: And the kind of tagline, it started with the book, Death in New York, and then I wrote a walking tour based on that.
Speaker: I have a walking tour, which is the next book.
Speaker: the psychiatric history of New York on the Upper East Side.
Speaker: So there's a theme, which ultimately is what the city doesn't want to see.
Speaker: And I have a couple of guides now so that I can withdraw and concentrate and go into the pub.
Speaker: But yeah, so I've also got Oppenheimer in New York on the Upper West Side, which is obviously the Manhattan Project plays a part in that, but it's literally how the city raised him.
Speaker: And I've got the Outlaws Who Built Manhattan.
Speaker: That's fairly self-explanatory with that title.
Speaker: That's in the financial district.
Speaker: Hellgate.
Speaker: which is really difficult to explain and it's really difficult to sell tickets because no one has a reference in mind.
Speaker: It's a part of the East River called Hellgate.
Speaker: Do you know the Hellgate break?
Speaker: I don't.
Speaker: And actually, I just, as she's like listing all these off, I'm like, okay, death, uh-huh, I did, okay, that's, I need to do all the rest of these.
Speaker: I've got a new one as well.
Speaker: It's going to be in Central Park.
Speaker: Central Park, Scandal and Vice.
Speaker: I need to do all of these.
Speaker: Sign me up.
Speaker: A lot of towers in Central Park, but not about that.
Speaker: Sign me up.
Speaker: Crimes and misdemeanors.
Speaker: Well, that is a wrap on our very interesting Central Park chit-chat with Crombie all the way from the UK.
Speaker: And thank you, New York, for the lovely background sounds.
Speaker: Should we do more lives?
Speaker: I think we should.
Speaker: I think they're more interesting.
Speaker: This is the first one.
Speaker: I'm privileged.
Speaker: You are the first one.
Speaker: The inaugural... The Glam Reaper in the wild, we'll call it, maybe.
Speaker: That's what this series will be.
Speaker: But in honour of that, Crombie has a lovely special offer for all the Glam Reaper listeners.
Speaker: Yeah, so if you book a ticket straight through the website PureFinder New York... I will leave the links.
Speaker: The code, if you want...
Speaker: 15% off any of the tours.
Speaker: Glam Reaper is the code word.
Speaker: Excellent.
Speaker: So we are going to put that and all of the information beneath this video.
Speaker: And I mean, I know I'm signing up to those last three tours that I didn't even know existed, even though that's terrible.
Speaker: But you need to do the first two.
Speaker: I have, in fairness, like it's been a lot and actually a lot of exciting news to unveil to you all.
Speaker: But yeah.
Speaker: Thank you so much for joining us.
Speaker: You're going to see her again because I've had her.
Speaker: This is the podcast.
Speaker: But she's you.
Speaker: Are you accompanying me?
Speaker: How did we meet?
Speaker: I mean, I know.
Speaker: Yeah, we met at the Irish consulate, which I kind of gate crashed.
Speaker: I wasn't supposed to be.
Speaker: She gate crashed.
Speaker: It was at the Irish consulate where somebody came up to me.
Speaker: I can't remember who was.
Speaker: I think it might have been the consulate general.
Speaker: The consulate general.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Speaking to me, heard the word death.
Speaker: Death.
Speaker: Said you need to meet.
Speaker: We meet each other.
Speaker: So the glam reaper meets death in New York.
Speaker: And here we are many years later.
Speaker: Two years later, I think.
Speaker: A year and a half, something like that.
Speaker: Anyway, that's it.
Speaker: So thank you very much for tuning in or watching if you're on YouTube or tuning in to the podcast.
Speaker: And we will see you all again soon.
Speaker: Thank you so much.
Speaker: Thank you.
