New York City was gridded for life, not death, and by the late eighteen-twenties there was no good place to put all the bodies. Burial grounds were brimming. New Yorkers walked around holding vinegar-soaked handkerchiefs to their faces, believing that “putrid miasmas” emanated from graveyards and killed people. Scientists were only starting to piece together that contaminated water, not flawed character, caused cholera; that smallpox probably originated in rodents; and that yellow fever was the vector work of the lowly mosquito, not the result of immigration or rotting vegetables. A case of yellow fever, a disease that inspired what one doctor called “great terror,” often started with a headache, followed by a high temperature, a slow heart rate, delirium, a sallow complexion, and bleeding from the eyes, nose, and gums. A telltale sign of imminent demise was “ropy mucous coffee-ground black vomit.” Sweet death: no relief. “The increment of the city” was overtaking one graveyard after another and exposing the dead to “violation in the opening of streets, and other city improvements,” David Bates Douglass, a prominent surveyor and civil engineer, wrote. Finding a solution was a matter of “great and urgent solicitude.”
New Haven, Connecticut, had “reformed” its graveyard—by creating a new one at the edge of town. Other places picked up on the idea of “rural” cemeteries. In Paris, Père Lachaise Cemetery, modelled on an English garden, opened in what is now the Twentieth Arrondissement, and Boston, inspired by Lachaise, created Mt. Auburn Cemetery in Cambridge. Henry Evelyn Pierrepont, a wealthy developer and urban planner, wanted something similar for New York. Douglass, who was scouting locations for him, knew of some “hills back of Brooklyn.”
The site stood “at the distance of two and a half miles from the South Ferry,” Douglass wrote in a report. He described the landscape as “beautifully diversified with hill and valley—descending in some places to less than twenty feet above tide-water, and in others, rising to more than two hundred,” with a “variety and beauty of picturesque scenery” rarely found in “so small a compass.” The terrain lent itself to “a high degree of adaptation, as a place of sepulture either in tombs or in graves.”
Geologically, Douglass was describing a push moraine: about twenty thousand years ago, the front edge of a glacier advanced and retreated, over and over, rumpling the earth like a thin rug badly vacuumed. The result was a tumble of hills and knolls, tiered cliffs, kettle depressions created by massive blocks of stranded ice—these later became ponds—and a vast outwash plain. Part of the Battle of Long Island, an unsuccessful but pivotal moment in the Revolutionary War, had been fought there, at the highest point in Brooklyn, in late August of 1776. Pierrepont bought a hundred and seventy-eight acres.