NINE FEET UNDER.

Publication: The New Yorker

Publication Date: 14-JUL-03

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COPYRIGHT 2003 All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of The Condé Nast Publications Inc.

The big perk in being able to trace your ancestry to an owner of the New York Marble Cemetery, the city's oldest nonsectarian public burial place, behind the Provenzano-Lanza Funeral Home, off Second Avenue above Second Street (not to be confused with the New York City Marble Cemetery, across Second Avenue, which has monuments aboveground), is that you are eligible for occupancy, though none of the people at a recent owners' meeting looked ready to descend into the vaults on a permanent basis. Inspired by a yellow-fever epidemic, the developer of the cemetery, one Perkins Nichols, in 1830, encased the...

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