Impact of Hurricane Sandy on New York’s African Burial Ground

New York’s African Burial Ground is the largest known intact colonial African cemetery in America and today it remains closed due to Hurricane Sandy’s impact on lower Manhattan. The cemetery, used between the late 1600s and 1796, stretches more than 5 city blocks in lower Manhattan. The burial ground contains more than 400 remains of what is believed to be the first group of African slaves brought to the city, but it is believed that burial ground may have originally contained between ten thousand and twenty thousand burials.