Calvary Cemetery is Part of the “Cemetery Belt” in New York City In the 1830s and ’40s, a series of outbreaks (typhus, cholera, etc.) had plagued New York City, causing a huge spike in the ...

In terms of interments, Calvary Cemetery is the largest cemetery in the United States. With three million, the dead outnumber the 2.2 million living in Queens. But Calvary is more about sheer expanse.

In the cemetery’s first fifty years, almost 650,000 people were buried at Calvary. 200,000 more were buried between 1898 and 1907, due to the influenza pandemic that struck New York. So many people ...