NEW YORK (AP) - Brooklyn’s historic Green-Wood Cemetery has bought back land it originally sold to a church in 1860, spending $500,000 for less than half an acre.
Green-Wood bought back the small patch of land from the Old First Reformed Church because of concerns about running out of space for burials. The New York Times reports (https://nyti.ms/2sEu4Fv ) the land was actually a section of plots inside Green-Wood itself - a cemetery-within-a-cemetery.
The church ended up never using the land originally bought in 1860, 22 years after the cemetery opened.
The cemetery is concerned about having space for more graves given the constraints of land in New York City. Christopher Coutts, a researcher on cemeteries, says the space problem is expected to worsen when the baby-boomer generation begins to die in significant numbers.
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Information from: The New York Times, https://www.nytimes.com
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