1440 Forest Avenue Shopping Plaza
1440 Forest Avenue | Westerleigh | built 1987
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The city photographed every building for its tax records around 1940 and again in the 1980s. NYC Municipal Archives.
Written with AI from the source each entry cites, then fact-checked.
- 1850
A Black church's burying ground, Cherry Lane Cemetery, takes shape on this land
Before the shopping plaza, this was the Cherry Lane Cemetery, also called the Colored Cemetery, deeded in 1850; a later plaque says John W. and Tabitha Blake gave the site to the Second Asbury A.M.E. Church. By the last burial, about 1916, as many as 1,000 people lay here, among them Benjamin Prine, the last person born into slavery on Staten Island, who died at 99.
Source: atlasobscura.com
- 1956
A court rules the cemetery is not a cemetery, and the land changes hands for $100
In 1954 Sidelle Mann, sister of real estate lawyer Edward Menden, sued the cemetery's owners, arguing no cemetery existed there. The cemetery board's lawyer, John Braisted, lost: in 1956 the court agreed and let Mann buy the land. She sold it to her brother for $100 the same day. The bodies stayed in the ground.
Source: atlasobscura.com
- 1962
A gas station is built over the graves after the Mendens die in a plane crash
Edward and Marjorie Menden died in a plane crash in 1962, and with no children the land went back to Sidelle Mann. She sold it for $75,000 to her cousin Max Menden, a car salesman, and it became a Shell station. Pumps were sunk into the ground with the burials still beneath, since in the courts' eyes there were no bodies to move.
Source: atlasobscura.com
- 1991
A plaque for the buried cemetery goes up in a bank lobby, under a CD-rate sign
The Angiuli family bought the property in 1981 and built the strip mall. Borough Historian Richard Dickenson asked them for a memorial naming the dead, of whom about 50 are known, but they refused a monument. The compromise was a plaque in the First National Bank on the premises, placed in 1991 beneath an ad for CD rates. The plaque has since disappeared.
Source: atlasobscura.com
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