New rental units to built on a Graveyard

Jackson Av & Orchard St

A giant new megaproject is coming to Queens Plaza in Long Island City, on the site of what was once a cemetery, owned by a family that settled there 350 years ago.

H&R Real Estate Investment Trust has teamed up with developer Tishman Speyer to built a "landmark luxury residential rental development" next to Gotham Center, an office building at Queens Plaza and 28th Street. Construction is set to begin in 2015, It will be a  42 stories tower with 1,600 rental apartments and 30,000 square feet of retail space, in addition to the regular amenities.

According to The New York Times The Van Alst family cemetery was rediscovered only a little more than a decade ago, after the city decided to rezone the mostly industrial tract for residential, retail and office development.

As part of the proposed rezoning of the development site in Long Island City by the City Planning Commission, an archaeological consulting firm, Historical Perspectives, was hired in 2000 to research the environmental impact.

The consultant found that in 1925, Harry Van Alst, a Queens lawyer who lived in Long Island City, received an anonymous telephone call informing him that workers expanding the West Disinfecting Company’s complex had unearthed bones and remnants of caskets, roughly at Jackson Avenue and Orchard Street. He had them moved to Cypress Hills Cemetery and reburied.

But the consultant was unable to determine how many family members had been buried in the family plot originally, how many had been removed earlier and how many were reinterred in 1925 in Cypress Hills, and concluded: “There is still the possibility that undisturbed burials exist within the potential development site.”

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