First Shearith Israel Graveyard

The First Shearith Israel Graveyard sits as a quiet, elevated fragment of history amidst the bustle of Two Bridges. You are looking at the only remaining structure from the seventeenth century still standing in all of Manhattan. While today it appears as a small, fenced-in plot, this site was once a sprawling hill that overlooked the East River at the edge of the early colonial settlement. Its survival is an outlier in a city that has spent centuries erasing its oldest physical layers to make room for new growth.