NEW YORK — Archeologists believe two centuries-old burial vaults discovered beneath a New York City street this week were likely part of a Presbyterian church cemetery.
Principal investigator Alyssa Loorya says Thursday the roughly 15-by-18-foot crypts near Manhattan’s Washington Square Park were found Tuesday.
She says they probably were built in the late 18th or early 19th centuries.
Workers starting a years-long water main replacement project happened upon the tombs’ brick roofs just 3 ½ feet beneath the street.
Archeologists from Chrysalis were on site because the nearby Greenwich Village park was a Potter’s Field for yellow fever victims in the early 1800s.
Loorya says skeletons and skulls are visible in one of the vaults. She says more than a dozen of stacked coffins are visible in the other.
