Three old friends from Elmhurst are reviving the memory of a local burial ground with an interactive website.
BY JACK DELANEY | jdelaney@queensledger.com
ELMHURST — When Marc Landas first learned about the woman in the iron coffin, he was astounded.
In 2011, archaeologists discovered a strange coffin while carrying out a routine dig at 47-11 90th St in Elmhurst. At first, police treated the case as a possible crime scene, but further tests revealed that the body inside was over 150 years old.
And she wasn’t alone: archival research confirmed that the site was likely the burial grounds of an African-American community that came to the neighborhood — then a settlement called Newtown — shortly after New York abolished slavery in 1827.
Mark called his friends, Greg Cassagnol and Jack Jaramillo, to share the news. The three had grown up in this corner of Elmhurst together in the 1970s and 80s; Landas and Cassagnol lived on Ithaca St, and Jaramillo was one block over on Judge St.
But this was something new. “We walked this area all our lives, and we had no idea this was going on,” said Jaramillo. When he was a kid, his dad owned property directly adjacent to the site of the burial ground, and the trio would sometimes accompany him, unaware of what lay beneath their feet.
The coffin was like a thunderbolt, illuminating their childhoods in a different light. “The way we thought of it, Elmhurst was always an Irish, Italian, German neighborhood,” remembered Cassagnol, whose family is Haitian. “So when you hear people telling you to go back where you came from, it would have been helpful for us to know — Hey, we were here too, and we were probably here before you guys arrived.”
The story gained traction. In 2018, seven years after the initial discovery, PBS released a documentary called “The Woman in the Iron Coffin,” uncovering more of the history behind the corpse later identified as Martha Peterson.
In 1828, four former slaves — Coles, Doyle, Potter, and Peterson — bought a piece of land from a white farmer named William Hunter. According to local historian James McMenamin, the group built two structures on the triangular parcel that exists today: a carpentry shop and house of worship, the Union African Church, so named because Corona Ave was once known as Union St.
The church would change hands over the decades, briefly hosting the famous abolitionist pastor and teacher James Pennington. By the 1870s it had become St. Mark’s AME, an African Methodist Episcopal institution, but the congregation sold the land and relocated in 1928 as Corona Ave widened to its doorstep and began bustling with industry.
Following the move, St. Mark’s — which currently sits on 95th Street and Northern Boulevard — requested that the city transfer the bodies in its graveyard to Mount Olivet Cemetery in Maspeth. Yet only 20 of the hundreds of cadavers were sent there, and the rest lay underneath a lot abutting the train tracks of the LIRR, churchless and mostly forgotten by the public, until 2011.
With the documentary’s release, the debate over the burial ground’s future reached its peak. Any developer looking to build on the site is legally required to consult with St. Mark’s, which hoped at the time to negotiate the construction of a ground-floor cultural center within a larger condominium. But after initially agreeing to those terms, the firm the church had been working with — 90 Queens Inc. — put the lot on the market for $14 million.
No one took those terms. The most recent property records, dated to last year, link the embattled site to the sale of tax lien. And relations between the landlord and the church remain tense — the pastor of St. Mark’s AME, Rev. Kimberly Dethridge, told Landas that the company had hung up on her the last few times she had called. (Representatives for 90 Queens Inc. did not return a request for comment by print time.)
“I think the church feels burned, and they don’t have unlimited capabilities,” said Landas.
Cassagnol, Jaramillo, Landas returned to the story of the burial grounds in 2024, amazed that there was still no recognition of its historical significance: no plaque, no monument, and no landmark status.
In the meantime, Landas had launched an online magazine, Scientific Inquirer, which publishes articles on both local history and general science coverage. Hoping to pick up where “The Women in the Iron Coffin” left off, the trio began writing pieces about the early African-American community in Newtown to raise awareness, with the ultimate goal of establishing a monument in the nearby micro-park of Middlesburgh Triangle.
Now the friends have released their most ambitious tribute to the graveyard yet: An interactive website called “Wall of Ghosts” that uses archival documents and AI-generated portraits to bring to life the freed slaves who lived in Newtown, many of whom were likely buried under 47-11 90th St.
Because records are scant, the 238 profiles on the page often include very few details — first name, age, and the date they were manumitted, or freed. But the inventive use of AI allows users from Elmhurst to imagine the personalities that would have walked their neighborhood two centuries ago.
For Cassagnol, it’s important to preserve the area’s history to prevent it from being whitewashed. “It was odd to us that Elmhurst or Newtown never got the recognition that there was a Black population there,” he explained.
And the trio maintains that “Wall of Ghosts” is just the beginning. Each is bringing their own unique skillset to the table as they rally for a more permanent marker: along with the material published by the Scientific Inquirer, Jaramillo is leveraging his background as a writer and producer to potentially film a documentary; Cassagnol, a vendor with the public school system, will be rolling out a series of assembly presentations about the burial grounds as part of the Black Studies curriculum.
One target demographic for the website is the students at Newtown High School, which many of their friends and family members attended.
“It’s literally across the street,” said Cassagnol. “And I guarantee you that none of the kids in that school know that there’s an actual burial ground right there.”
