Calvary Cemetery

Calvary Cemetery defines the landscape of Woodside with its dense, rolling expanse of three million headstones, a scale that makes it the most populous burial ground in the United States. Established in eighteen forty-eight by the Trustees of Saint Patrick’s Cathedral, it occupies three hundred and sixty-five acres originally intended to accommodate the city’s overflow of Catholic burials. The Manhattan skyline rises jaggedly behind the cemetery’s western edge, visible over rows of monuments that are physically separated by the busy concrete corridors of the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway and the Long Island Expressway.