Calvary Cemetery

Calvary Cemetery in the Maspeth and Woodside neighbourhoods of Queens holds roughly three million burials, more than any other cemetery in the United States. The Archdiocese of New York opened it in 1848 once Manhattan's Catholic city graveyards could no longer absorb the wave of Irish immigrants arriving after the Great Famine. On its gently rolling hill above the Long Island Expressway, granite crosses, Victorian angels and family mausoleums stand in dense ranks. From the upper plateau the much-photographed view of the Manhattan skyline rises behind the headstones. The Jewish Mount Zion Cemetery borders it directly to the east, letting visitors walk through two nineteenth-century migration histories within a few steps.