2. The Vaults of New York Marble Cemetery
New York Marble Cemetery in the East Village is not your typical cemetery. You won’t see any gravestones, mausoleums, or columbariums. Instead, you’ll see a well manicured lawn and blooming flowers, inviting benches, and long stone walls lined with marble plaques. Doesn’t seem so spooky from above ground, but here, instead of interring coffins directly in the earth, they were interred in underground marble vaults. These enclosures were created for fear of diseases spreading from corpses. The are 156 marble vaults the size of small rooms buried ten feet below the ground. They are arranged in a grid of six columns by twenty-six rows. To gain access to the vaults, visitors needed to remove stone slabs, with some requiring keys to open.
Incorporated in 1831, a year before New York City Marble Cemetery (which is just one block away), the cemetery was New York City’s first non-sectarian burial place open to the public. The last burial occurred in 1937. Today, the landmarked site serves as a public gathering space. You can visit and enjoy a picnic on the grounds during Open Gate Days which occur at least once a month.