Woman Sues to Unearth Centuries of Memories From Mounds of Trash

Lot 5, Block 5090. Anna Lascurain looked at her tax map once again, checking the address for the triangular sliver of land that the map-maker had marked with crosses. This couldn’t be the place. But the map said it was.

She eyed the mounds of dirt, the asphalt, the piles of old tires. There were stones, but not the kind she was looking for. They were chunks of concrete, chipped bricks, jagged rocks. They sat amid leaking oil cans, Cheez Doodles wrappers, a sneaker.

For more than a year, Lascurain had searched for City Cemetery, the potter’s field that held the remains of 18,000 people without funds or family to pay for burial.

The first bodies went into the ground in 1869, the last in 1954. Among them was George Spade, a penniless tanner shot to death in 1921 by his third wife. The city buried him in the tidy, 5.2-acre cemetery and assigned him, like the others, a stick and a number.

His daughter, Elsie, who is Anna Lascurain’s mother, never knew where he was buried. She was 7 and in foster care when Spade died at age 41. She has no photographs, only a few memories: him swinging her onto his shoulders at a Jersey City parade, him revealing the picture he kept of her inside a gold watch.

It took Elsie years to find the death certificate. By then, no one had heard of City Cemetery. So Anna turned to tax maps.

Finally she found what she was looking for. But she didn’t know how to tell her mother.

In the end, she just showed her--brought her to a dirty, forlorn section of the city, a patch surrounded by highway, by the railroad tracks of the busy Northeast Corridor and by the Anheuser-Busch brewery.

Elsie Lascurain let out a sob, grabbed her daughter’s arm and nearly fell to her knees.

“Oh my God,” she said. “Look what they did to my father.”

There are stories centuries old of cities building atop potter’s fields. In 1888, the city reburied bodies from a potter’s field in what is now downtown Newark. Washington Square Park and the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel are both former grave sites for thousands of New York City’s poor.

But historians can’t remember a cemetery under garbage.

“It’s very sort of outside the American culture to let a cemetery like that totally disappear,” said David Sloane, author of “The Last Great Necessity,” a history of U.S. cemeteries. “It reflects on how the memory of those people was so easily disposed of.”

City officials won’t talk now about the trashing of the 129-year-old City Cemetery. In court documents, they say they don’t know exactly where the bodies are. No burial records, no maps, no536870914names.

But no one has denied the story told by the state attorney general’s office and Elsie Lascurain, who has sued the city and demands it remove the garbage in a restoration that will likely cost millions, a restoration that the city has agreed to perform.

In the decades since 1954, Newark turned its potter’s field into a dump. In the 1960s it began using the land for storage, and in 1975 it leased part of the land to an industrial supply company, lawyers for Lascurain and the state say.

The bodies were never removed, making the conversion illegal. State law allows cities to redevelop their cemeteries only if the bodies are reburied. But a 1966 news article describes workers unearthing three human skulls and other bones while digging a new sewer.

When the deputy attorney general, Nancy Costello Miller, visited the cemetery this summer, she saw large piles of tires, a Dumpster, abandoned single-story buildings and other debris. A city sanitation truck drove onto the grounds while she was there.

“There was no indication at the site that the area had ever been a cemetery,” Miller wrote to city attorneys.

That explains why Jean Volz of Nutley could never find it.

She searched for years, circling Routes 1 and 9 looking for Bessemer Street, where the cemetery is listed on recent road maps. Nothing looked even vaguely like a cemetery.

“Horrible,” she said when she learned--and saw--what had become of it. “At least in a vandalized, overgrown cemetery, you do know that it was a cemetery.”

Volz’ maternal grandfather, Charles Arnold, is buried in City Cemetery, killed in a fall during a construction accident in 1902. Volz has traced her mother’s family to Wales in the 1600s, documenting their burials. Arnold, she said, “is one of the relatives that I have not found yet.”

Volz told her friend, Betty Johnson, about City Cemetery. Johnson had been searching since the 1980s for the resting place of her grandfather, Edward Peale, a laborer who died of pneumonia in a mental institution in 1909.

Johnson traveled from her home in Wantage to Newark’s City Hall and the Hall of Records, asking for directions.

“They didn’t know anything about a Newark City Cemetery,” she said.

Others with relatives in City Cemetery have similar stories, saying the city misled them or just had never heard of the burial ground.

Viola Whitaker, 75, looked for her mother, Viola Bryant, for decades. She was 8 when her mother died in 1931. Like Lascurain, she has few memories other than images: a train trip to Jersey City, her mother’s light complexion, her beautiful hair.

In 1995 she obtained a death certificate with City Cemetery’s name. A woman at a welfare service told her that the cemetery “had been turned into some kind of yard.” City officials later told her the area was being used to house old cars.

Whitaker, who lives in New York City, wants Bryant’s remains reburied in a family plot in Woodbridge.

“I just think that would make her happy,” she said.

Without official burial records, lawyers and investigators rely on newspapers and history books to tell City Cemetery’s story.

The city bought a 15-acre property in 1865. Keeping five acres for a potter’s field, it sold the rest in 1903 to a railroad. Historians speculate that bodies had been buried in the portion the city sold.

By 1923, 14,000 bodies had been buried on the remaining patch of land, according to an article in the Newark Sunday Call. In 1953, the city proposed burying its dead in private plots. It called the potter’s field desirable for development. The 1966 newspaper article reporting the discovery of bones said the cemetery had been used as a storage yard for six years.

In 1975, the Newark City Council voted to lease part of the cemetery to Kingsland Drum & Barrel Co. Inc., also a defendant in the Lascurain lawsuit. Lascurain’s lawyers want to include members of that council of 23 years ago as defendants. Among them is Sharpe James, who today is Newark’s mayor.

Lawyers say that without city burial records it is unlikely anyone could exhume bodies for reburial now. A geological firm hired by the city plans to use ground-penetrating radar to identify bones.

Though the city has no records, Geta Spatola O’Connor does. The funeral director leafs through three leather-bound ledgers she has kept for nearly 50 years. In careful penmanship are the records of perhaps 1,000 bodies interred in City Cemetery between 1949 and 1954.

There are names, birth dates. There are places of death: “Sudden in rooming house.” “Sudden in hotel.” There are causes of death: “Cerebral Thrombosis.”

Her father, George Spatola, was hired in 1948 to manage the potter’s field. The city paid him $44 per burial, $30 for babies.

When a poor person died, Spatola would send a hearse to pick up the remains. Each body was covered in an embossed gray cloth and placed in a wooden coffin. After Spatola took over the cemetery, each body was accompanied by an 18-inch gray metal marker bearing the name of the dead.

George Spatola did more than that. He set to making the place human. He named the cemetery Floral Rest and had the city build an arch, add shrubbery, erect a flagpole. It looked, O’Connor said, like a cemetery--and certainly not like it does now.

“My dad really tried to give those poor souls some dignity by giving them a name,” she said. “If he were alive, he would just be horrified.”

Lawyers for Lascurain initially wanted the city to restore the 10-acre plot that was sold to the railroad in 1903. It is now partially covered by railroad tracks that carry freight and people up and down the East Coast.

But Superior Court Judge Julio Fuentes has rejected that plan; he says there’s not enough evidence that bodies were buried there.

Joan Geismar, an urban archeologist, disagrees. Four years ago, in a feasibility study for a transportation project, she concluded that bodies are probably on that property, perhaps directly under the railroad.

Lascurain hasn’t returned to her father’s resting place since that day she visited with her daughter. She just can’t.

“I get nightmares. The dirt and stuff, that’s all I see,” she says. “Eighteen thousand people there, all under garbage.”

Lascurain wants her father’s remains so she can rebury them in her own plot, next to her husband and stillborn daughter. If she dies before that happens, she wants her other daughter, Anna, to continue the fight.

Other relatives sit hopefully, awaiting a place to mourn their dead, bitter over the years the city didn’t respond to their search for their personal history.