defaulted on its mortgage and then disappeared<\/a>.<\/p>\nAs a result, the lot is now in foreclosure and controlled by another LLC, 90 Street Realty LLC, which bought the original loan and now wants to sell it to recover at least some of the $6.5 million it is owed.<\/p>\n
Matthew Barish, an attorney for 90 Street Realty LLC, did not respond to several calls seeking comment on how the owner intends to address the issue of the burial ground as it tries to sell the property.<\/p>\n
The City Reporter reached Jiashu Xu, listed as a principal of 90 Street Realty LLC, on Friday. Told of the existence of the burial ground at the property, he angrily responded, \u201cWe are a bank. We bought a loan. We don\u2019t know nothing else.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cIf the state of this lot is to be developed, if that is what the bank wants to do, they still have to acknowledge this,\u201d Loorya noted. \u201cNothing can happen until they address this.\u201d<\/p>\n
The\u00a0lot is currently subject to the state\u2019s Unmarked Burial Site Protection Act and has a restriction stipulating whoever wants to develop it must first address the existence of the burial site, which Chrysalis estimates still contains dozens more human remains.<\/p>\n
The act requires the involvement of the state archaeologist in any effort to remove human remains from such sites, but it didn\u2019t go into effect until 2023 \u2014 two years after Chrysalis performed its exploration at the Elmhurst site and removed and stored the remains off site.<\/p>\n
In response to questions from The City Reporter, State Archaeologist Christina Rieth said because of the timing, \u201cWe have not been involved in and have no knowledge of any reinterment efforts.\u201d But going forward, Rieth noted, \u201cIf someone is seeking assistance with proper reinterment, they can contact us and we will be happy to provide guidance to them in our official capacity.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u2018What Would It Take to Quash This?\u2019<\/p>\n
When the first iron coffin was discovered during construction of condos at the site, the project was put on hold for a time. The owners, 90 Queens LLC, then reached an agreement to proceed with St. Mark AME, which once owned the property but sold it in the 1930s and moved to Jackson Heights.<\/p>\n
Under a \u201cmemorandum of understanding,\u201d 90 Queens LLC promised to create a special community room and an exterior memorial that would tell the stories of those buried at the Elmhurst site in exchange for continuing with the condo plan.<\/p>\n
The owners hired Chrysalis, which soon found a prior examination triggered by the iron coffin discovery \u201cgrossly underestimated\u201d the scope of the site as containing no more than a dozen graves. Chrysalis ultimately excavated 10 graves which were regularly spaced in a pattern that indicated there were likely more than 100 bodies buried there.<\/p>\n
Corroborating that analysis, prior historical records cited by the city Landmarks Preservation Commission estimated upwards of 300 individuals \u2014 most likely slaves or freed slaves \u2014 had been buried there dating back to 1818.<\/p>\n
At first, the Chrysalis team had great plans to do a proper exploration of the site to gain insight into the lives of African Americans in New York City in the 19th century, a history that has long been neglected, Loorya said.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt was an excellent opportunity,\u201d she said. \u201cWe talked about doing more than [performing] just the average archaeology, doing some research about who these people are, what can we learn from them? There\u2019s a broader opportunity to look at the materials they were buried with, look at the [skeletal] morphology, learn who these people were.\u201d<\/p>\n
To ensure the integrity of the effort, Chrysalis worked to establish a relationship with Rev. Detherage, and in November 2020 \u2014 as COVID-19 consigned the world to wearing masks and standing six feet apart \u2014 a memorial ceremony was held at the site with Detherage and members of the congregation.<\/p>\n
By then, the ground had frozen and Chrysalis felt it couldn\u2019t remove the remains without damaging them, so the firm waited until it got warmer. The 10 human remains were removed that spring and placed in storage.<\/p>\n
Then, 90 Queens LLC stopped returning St. Mark\u2019s calls about the promised memorial room. The last time all the stakeholders had meetings to discuss the resolution of the site was in August and September of last year, and the owner was not present. Instead, someone claiming to be 90 Queens LLC\u2019s \u201crepresentative\u201d appeared.<\/p>\n
\u201cHe said, \u2018What would it take to quash this?’\u201d Rev. Detherage recalled. \u201cThey offered me several hundred thousand dollars.\u201d<\/p>\n
She demanded to speak to the owner and was given a contact number. When she called and identified herself, she said he hung up.<\/p>\n
Now the archaeological project was no longer certain. Chrysalis was out $167,000 the owner never paid, and the 10 sets of human remains were now caught in a kind of archaeological Twilight Zone.<\/p>\n
In 2025, 90 Queens LLC paved over the site and turned it into a parking lot. Dozens of junked cars wound up sitting on top of the graves, including cars and trucks brought there by a vendor hired by the NYPD to tow abandoned vehicles off the streets.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe never expected that they would renege on the [MOU] agreement,\u201d Rev. Detherage said. \u201cThat\u2019s what\u2019s so dishonest, that they don\u2019t care about the gravesite. They desecrated it. You allowed cars towed off the street to park there.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u2018It\u2019s Still Sacred Ground\u2019<\/p>\n
What will happen to the human remains in storage and the site itself remains unclear. <\/p>\n
After the iron coffin was discovered, the Elmhurst History and Cemeteries Preservation Society drafted an application to officially landmark the site, which \u2014 if granted \u2014 would restrict how the property could be developed. James McMenamin of the society said that effort \u201cwound up in purgatory\u201d after St. Mark agreed to allow the condos to go forward in exchange for the now-defunct community room and memorial.<\/p>\n
On Friday morning, the group submitted the draft application to the Landmarks Preservation Commission.<\/p>\n
\u201cNow that must be considered null and void and we can pursue a second landmarking effort,\u201d McMenamin told The City Reporter. \u201cEven though it\u2019s been disturbed many times, it\u2019s still sacred ground.\u201d<\/p>\n
For Loorya of Chrysalis, the question of how to honor the slaves and freed slaves buried at the site brings up larger issues beyond bureaucratic inertia.<\/p>\n
\u201cThere are certainly places throughout the city where people of color \u2014 enslaved and free \u2014 were interred. Poor people who have been interred that have been forgotten,\u201d she said. \u201cHow do we as a society and as a community address this?\u201d<\/p>\n
\n\tRelated<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Ten human remains found at a historic African burial ground in Queens were disinterred and placed in storage.…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":333859,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[9,56,63,65,64,14509],"class_list":["post-333858","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-new-york-city","tag-new-york","tag-ny","tag-nyc","tag-nyc-headlines","tag-nyc-news","tag-race"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/333858","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=333858"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/333858\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/333859"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=333858"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=333858"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=333858"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
![\"Members](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/afrcan_burial_ground_coffin.jpg\")
An image from the excavation of remains in an iron coffin from an Elmhurst, Queens, lot that once held the cemetery of the St. Mark AME Church, where enslaved and freed New Yorkers had been buried. Credit: Courtesy of St. Marks AME Church<\/p>\n