City workers made a stunning discovery this week when they stumbled upon a 19th century burial vault – which then led to the finding of a second tomb – containing skeletal remains beneath the edge of Washington Square Park.

Contractors for the Department of Design and Construction were attempting to dig up a 100-year-old water main near the park to replace them with brand new water main distribution lines when they unearthed the vault.

Workers found the tomb on Tuesday, which ultimately led to the discovery of a second vault on Wednesday. Both of the stone vaults with arched ceilings are 15 feet by 20 feet and eight feet deep and have wooden doors.

“We were doing our work to bring three water main connections to this neighborhood and as we were digging we found a vault,” DDC Commissioner Feniosky Peña-Mora said on Thursday at the site. “Then it turned out there were two vaults.”

The first vault contained scattered skeletal remains of up to 10 people, while the second tomb – which sits side by side with the first – had around 20 “in-tact” coffins, said Peña-Mora.

The historic vaults are connected to one of two church congregations whose members were buried there, said Archeologist Alyssa Loorya, whose Brooklyn-based company Chrysalis Archaeological Consultants is contracted by the city to have staff on-hand whenever construction projects take place in archaeologically sensitive areas.



Loorya immediately ran to the site on Tuesday when she got a text from a staffer about the vault finding. Archeologists will be using high resolution photography to identify the names on the coffin plates and to find out exactly how many human remains exactly are inside the vaults, she said.

“The city’s policy is to leave all burials intact and in place. So we’re not going to go into the vault,” said Loorya. “These people were buried and we respect that and we will just do as much documentation as possible from the ground and from the small view that we have.”

Anthropologists, the Landmarks Preservation Commission and even the city Medical Examiner’s Office are also on the case.

Archaeologists were investigating vault site on Thursday, which is past the east end of the Greenwich Village park between Waverly Place and Washington Place, to gather more information about the old cellars.

“It’s significant,” said Loorya. “Usually we’re dealing with broken bits of pottery and objects and we can learn so much from that and from past infrastructure. But actually being able to put names to areas and to commemorate some of those people, it’s different than seeing a name in a document. It makes it very real.”

After the Revolutionary War, Washington Square Park was used as a potter’s field or a public burial place mostly for poor people who succumbed to yellow fever.

Archaeologists discovered skeletal remains from four bodies in the park in January 2008 while doing soil tests as part of a park restoration.

The DDC has stopped all work at the site and is currently redesigning its project to avoid any contact with the vaults that were found.