Death and the City: Mortality and Mourning in Old New York

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The story of a city can be told through its dead. New York City’s history, infrastructure, growth, and development are not just the provenance of the living; our city’s evolution is reflected in the ways we treat our dead, from mourning to memorials.

This two-hour walking tour traces the history of death in the city from Lenape burial practices to hidden cemeteries of New Amsterdam, through the legacy of Colonial New York and the early Republic — wrought in stone in the neighborhood’s churchyards — up to the 19th century where we’ll see how sites of tragedy and disaster show how we care for and memorialize our dead – or don’t.

Along the way you will learn of the Manhattan Burial Crisis of 1822, the Doctor’s Riot of 1788, Revolutionary Prisons, the story of the African Burial Ground, murders, executions, epidemics, potters fields, and more as you discover how the history of death reveals the history of the city.

The tales told on this tour range from the to the heart-wrenching and horrific to the ghoulishly funny to the flat-out frightening. Our guides lead you through 400 years of legends and history––across burial grounds, sites of death, disease, and revolution––that still shape our city today.