Washington Square Park is a graveyard. You are sitting on bones. The fountain is a headstone for twenty thousand people who had no headstone. The playground is a cemetery for people who had no cemetery. You are eating a sandwich on top of the poor and the forgotten and the unclaimed. Nobody put up a sign.

Potter's Field opened in 1797. The city needed somewhere to put the people nobody wanted. Slaves. Strangers. Yellow fever dead hauled on carts from downtown. Suicide victims the churches would not bury. The poor who died without a dollar or a name. They dug trenches and they stacked the coffins and they covered them with dirt and they dug another trench. Assembly line burial. The first public works project was putting the dead underground.

I played guitar in that park for thirty years. I stood on the grass near the fountain and I sang about revolution and marijuana and the cops and I never once thought about what was under my feet. Twenty thousand bodies. Twenty thousand people who were too poor or too sick or too anonymous to be buried properly. I was standing on their shoulders and I did not know they were there. Every chord I played was a prayer I did not know I was saying.

They closed the burial ground in 1825 and they put in a park and they named it after George Washington. They did not move the bodies. Moving twenty thousand bodies is expensive. Grass is cheap. They put grass on top and benches on top and a fountain on top and they called it a park. The park is a lid. The most beautiful lid in Manhattan. Nobody thinks about what is underneath the lid because the lid has chess tables and a dog run.

The bodies are still there. Every time the city digs to fix a water main or plant a tree they find bones. Femurs and skulls and rib cages six feet under the place where NYU students sunbathe in April. The dead are not gone. The dead are resting under a park that was named after a man who owned slaves. Nobody talks about this at the farmer's market on Saturday.

See also: Hangman's Elm, Washington Square