Living Among the Dead in Manhattan

Even Manhattan hasn’t eliminated all of its cemeteries and old ghosts. Despite the late 19th- and early 20th-century efforts to banish graveyards in the name of public health and some vague sense of modern progress, at least nine graveyards can still be found on the island.

Among them is the New York City Marble Cemetery in the East Village, with monuments marking the underground vaults between tall ivy-covered trees. There’s also Old St. Patrick’s Cathedral, between Mott and Mulberry Streets, with its gray crypts wrapped in the protection of a red brick wall.

Perhaps the most beautiful is Trinity Church Cemetery, near Wall Street. Created in 1697, it’s where such figures as

Alexander Hamilton

and the steamboat inventor

Robert Fulton

are buried. Although hemmed in by the glassy skyscrapers of the financial district, the old marble, slate and granite headstones somehow fit the small space. A brick path drifts through the grass. “Sleep, Lovely Babe, and take thy rest,” reads the 1731 headstone of

Nicholas Ellsworth,

who died at age two, with a skull and two flowers carved above.

Less attractive, and perhaps for that reason starker in its reminder of the dead, is the Third Cemetery of the Spanish Portuguese Synagogue, on 21st St., between Sixth and Seventh Avenues. Stuck between nondescript yellow and red brick buildings, it almost looks like a backyard lot, with a Citi bike station in front. But through the curled pig-iron fence passersby can see the simple white gravestones set beneath five trees.

The ancient cities were built around the dead, the great scholar of Greek and Roman urban life, Fustel de Coulanges, argued in the 1860s. Attempting to turn their backs on death, modern cities have thinned down the human experience to nothing more than the present. Each small appearance of the dead in a city, each ghostly intrusion of the departed into our busy lives, reminds us that a connection to the past thickens the present. Our lives are built on the contributions of those who came before us, the things they built and the promises they made, explains Pastor

David Benke,

a Lutheran leader in New York. We are bound, he says, “to the dreams and hopes of those who preceded us,” because they “connect us to the bigger story, . . . to what I would call perpetual care.”

There’s a temptation to think about life only through the lens of the present and future. But “the presence of the dead is very palpable, and a graveyard is the material expression of that sociality or that communion,” insists Rabbi Gottlieb. The result is that cemeteries have an important effect on urban life. In all the city’s bustle, the cemeteries are there: a quiet presence that demands reflection. “When the graveyard is in the middle of the city, you can keep whistling” past it, says Rev.

Gerald Murray,

pastor of Holy Family Catholic Church on 47th St. “But one day the whistling is going to stop. It’s good to have that visual impact of a graveyard. It humanizes the city in a way that little else can do.”

Halloween is a Christian adaptation of Celtic pagan harvest festivals, particularly Samhain, in which the Celts would dress up in costumes to ward off ghosts. In the late Middle Ages, the October night was taken as the moment at which constraints on ghosts were weakest, before the holiness of the saints drove them back at dawn. Imported to America in the 19th century, Halloween became a kind of unserious harvest festival, mixed with elements of the Germans’ Walpurgis Night and the Mexicans’ Day of the Dead.

Among all the rest, Halloween can be a somber yet useful occasion. The quiet breaths of New York’s cemeteries serve as reminders of the past: murmurs that tell us we must die, and that the dead are still among us. Graveyards are “a good reminder,” Father Murray notes. “People nowadays would say, ‘No, that real estate is too valuable for a graveyard.’ ” We should say instead, “No, money can wait.”

Ms. Bottum is an assistant editorial features editor at the Journal.