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Rose climbed the steps and entered the gray stone New York Public Library through the center arch of the three that fronted the impressive building. Doric columns and high eaves with intricate carvings of leaves and flowers towered high above her. Inside, the space was capacious, with polished marble floors and a high curved ceiling. Several archways led to various rooms on the first floor, with huge staircases to either side leading to a mezzanine style second floor. More arches, daylight streaming through them, marched around the second level. A carving front and center between the two levels announced that she stood in Astor Hall. On the giant square columns at the start of each staircase, the names of numerous benefactors were carved. Rockefellers and counts and even Astor herself among them.
Rose moved slowly through the huge building, marveling at the age and beauty. It wasn’t old by British historical standards, but as an American institution, it held the weight of history. She tried not to resent Jake and his lunch with Matthew Price. She held her reservations about the man, and wouldn’t change her mind easily about that. She had learned to trust her instincts. Most women she knew trusted their initial reactions to men, even if they might be proven wrong later. She also knew Jake was partly pushing back against her friendship with Jazz, and she could understand that too. An electricity existed between her and the reporter that only a fool would deny. But she had no intention to act on it and perhaps he would only believe that once he saw it to be true. Any promises on her part would fall on deaf ears in the meantime. Perhaps she simply needed to give that time and let Jake see the truth of it. Besides, she could busy herself here while he enjoyed lunch with his aunt’s new beau. Maybe he’d return equally suspicious of Price and his motives after spending time alone with the man. She hoped so. That would achieve far more than Rose trying to convince him of her feelings, with no substance to back them with other than intuition.
She walked through a room with dozens of long desks, lamps with gold metal shades spaced evenly among them, three to a table. Lots of people sat at the desks, reading, researching, some simply enjoying the space, gazing around the huge room. A large wooden door with a convoluted frame stood at the far end. Above it, in gold letters, was the legend:
A good Booke is the pretious life-blood of a mafter fpirit, imbalm’d and treafur’d up on purpofe to a life beyond life.
Rose smiled. Almost deliberately opaque in phrasing, but a fine sentiment nonetheless. She began searching for books to sate her need to know more about what she had seen with Jazz and Jake in Washington Square Park. While the news story would undoubtedly be the fresh bodies, there was a lot more to the place, a long history like so much of New York City. It was built in layers, after all, from its earliest settlement to the modern metropolis. Jazz’s talk of layers had alluded to that, and it intrigued Rose to consider it.
Her research led her to discover a more morbid and macabre history than she ever imagined. In the late 18th and early 19th century, the area that became Washington Square Park was nothing more than a potter’s field, a strangely euphemistic name for a mass grave site for the indigent, poor, criminals, and victims of epidemics. The term had biblical origins, referring to a clay-heavy area of land near Jerusalem that was bought with the thirty pieces of silver returned by a remorseful Judas to the chief priests. Worthless for farming, the land came to be used to bury strangers, and the name of a potter’s field had been used to describe such places ever since.
What would become Washington Square Park was originally a farm, purchased in 1797 by the city for this purpose, and it remained a potter’s field until around 1827 when Washington Square was legally declared a public space. But its history wasn’t only sad, it was cruel. The site was also used as an execution ground, the last execution, that of a slave, took place in 1819, with the slave’s burial taking place in the same field.
During celebrations of the 50th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence, the place was renamed the Washington Military Parade Ground, and transformed from a burial site to a bucolic green space. But the pleasant park retained its history, the bodies that had been buried there remaining undisturbed. Rose thought that was deliciously macabre. She found excerpts from a guide book called Inside the Apple: A Streetwise History of New York City by Michelle and James Nevius, who wrote that, “While estimates vary, it seems likely that over 20,000 people were buried in the land.... The bulk of the bodies were never disinterred, which means that they remain to this day under the grass and pavement of Washington Square.”
Rose sat back from her research, equally fascinated and appalled. They had been walking over the remains of tens of thousands of people, unawares. Every day, thousands of living people did the same, and no doubt there were many such places in New York City. It really was an ideal place to hide fresher corpses if the perpetrator knew a way to secret them there. Of course, the waterworks in the park had interrupted that carefully laid plan. Those poor city workers must stumble across ancient corpses with some regularity. Of course, this time, the corpses, at least several of them, weren’t ancient. That was something else entirely.
She read on, following the rabbit hole of research into potter’s fields, which led her to learn about Hart Island, an uninhabited strip of land off the coast of the Bronx in Long Island Sound. If Washington Square Park had been macabre, this place was positively terrifying in its implications. The city had bought Hart Island in 1868 and used it as a burial ground and a prison for Confederate soldiers. For more than a century, the dead shared the island with living inmates of one kind or another, many of whom were likely to end up in its mass graves themselves. To this day, prison inmates, for 50c a day, bury the unclaimed dead there, stacked in plain coffins shoulder to shoulder like bricks in numbered trenches.
The corpses of the poor, the destitute, those executed by the state, or donated to medical science, and a thousand other sources, all filled trench after trench on Hart Island. New York, like many states, had added dissection to death sentences for murder, arson and even burglary by the early 19th century, circumventing an otherwise illegal practice. The demand for medical cadavers soon outstripped the legal supply of executed felons, and a black market in corpses bloomed. Slave owners “donated” or sold bodies of dead slaves to medical schools and schools in competition with each other smuggled in black bodies stashed in whiskey barrels. Potter’s fields, almshouse cemeteries, and African-American burial grounds were regularly robbed as professors paid top dollar for corpses delivered without questions asked. These corpses would then end up later interred on Hart Island, stacked in the mass graves, forgotten, unrecorded, unlamented. Over more than one hundred and fifty years, in excess of one million people had been buried on Hart Island. That was a staggering number to imagine.
Rose found photos and drone footage of the island as it was now. Crumbling and derelict institutional buildings, including a lunatic asylum, a tuberculosis hospital, a boys’ reformatory, slowly decaying around the open ground being reserved for ever more mass grave trenches, filled with forgotten bodies buried three deep, row after row after row.
Rose stood and moved away from her research, amazed at the stories, and deeply saddened by the seeming inhumanity that such dense populations triggered. And besides, the research was moving her away from finding more about Washington Square Park and the fresh bodies they had discovered there. While learning about Hart Island gave her a greater insight into what happened historically at Washington State Park, it didn’t move her forward with new information.
She decided to change tack. Jake had said about the uniformity of holes in the skulls of all the bodies he had seen in that newly disturbed underground chamber. That had to be relevant, it had to mean something, but she couldn’t decide what. When Rose closed her eyes and pictured the scene, she knew he was right. It took some time, a whole different approach to the angle of her search, but Rose was in her element, the historian in her reveling at the challenge. Why would someone put holes in skulls like that? What sort of practice might they be pursuing? Pre-death or post?
She had no idea how long she’d been at it, learning all kinds of things, when one particular article caught her attention. She paused, staring hard at the piece for several seconds before whispering to herself, “That is not possible.”