Riverside Ruins on Blissville’s Banks

The quiet streets of Blissville, Queens cannot be found on maps of New York City. Located in a borough synonymous with change and diversity, where storefront awnings parade every language, flag, and color down the eclectic Roosevelt Avenue, Blissville is an oasis of gray. Though its name conjures the ethereal heavens, downtown Blissville rises along the twin hills of the Calvary Cemetery like the ruins of an ancient Roman city in miniature.

At sunset from the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway (BQE), the cemetery’s congested silhouettes of stone crucifixes, marble statues, and obelisks merge with the Manhattan skyline to create a strange and sprawling panorama. Though a billboard just past the cemetery gates advertises the wonders of Istanbul, the view of the city from here more aptly embodies the grandeur of Constantinople. Had Constantine’s severed head stood among the monuments, it would have seamlessly fit the scene.

In 1845, starved for Catholic burial grounds in the bustling city, St. Patrick’s Cathedral purchased a 115-acre tract of land in the city of Newtown, Long Island. On this hilly site, just north of the Newtown Creek and surrounded by farmland, the people here used to stuff the ground with the bodies of dead Irishmen to make high ground for the mausoleums of the rich. Queens has changed greatly since then, though there still remains little occasion to walk by this part of town.

Isolated by the Queens-Midtown Expressway, the BQE, and the Newtown Creek industrial area, the Calvary Cemetery can be tough to find by foot. Just north of it, the 7 train runs along Queens Boulevard through an area called Sunnyside, home to an ethnic panoply of Koreans, Mexicans, Indians, and Romanians, just to name a few. A brief stroll along Greenpoint Avenue in Sunnyside bears witness to the arbitrary and spontaneous world of immigrants. For all the bygone Sicilian villages relocated to tenements or the forgotten Kleindeustchland of the Lower East Side, Queens may yet be New York’s most chaotic experiment in cultural simultaneity.

Farther south down Greenpoint Avenue, the Albanian meat markets and Chinese massage parlors gradually give way to gas stations and tar pits. By the time the Calvary Cemetery comes into view, the origin of the name “Sunnyside” seems increasingly clear. Blissville occupies a blurred and murky area between nearby Maspeth, Sunnyside, and Newtown. Despite the uncertainty of its boundaries, this section of Queens will regardless be best known as a district of graveyards. For in addition to Calvary, the cemeteries of New Calvary and Mount Zion make up the remainder of Blissville’s primarily interred population.

On a sunny day after a heavy snowfall, the headstones at the Calvary Cemetery present an eerie reflection against the backdrop of Manhattan. Along its snow-whitened thoroughfares, tombstones follow straight paths like rows of Brooklyn brownstones, while obelisks pierce the sky in harmony with the spires of the Chrysler and Empire State Buildings. Though New York’s more famous cemeteries offer bucolic landscapes and quiet ponds, the Calvary Cemetery has something distinctly Gotham about it. Some of the city’s greatest mobsters, including the fictitious godfather, Vito Corleone, are buried here, along with the coarse-voiced former Governor and Presidential candidate Alfred E. Smith.

Among the tombstones of mobsters, priests, and politicians, the walkways of the Calvary Cemetery assume a peculiarly urban character. The mausoleums of affluent patrons cluster around the central chapel like the mansions of the wealthy as tall monuments, topped by graceful nymphs, provide the elegant décor. Wider roads for cars run like rivers through the miniature city, while a domed sepulchre and an adjacent mausoleum serve respectively as a metaphorical civic center and railroad station.

Just as a city begins to take shape in miniature, it at once transforms into a kind of ancient ruin. Pieced together from the vestiges of Carthage, Egyptian obelisks, and the freestanding columns of old Roman forums, the Calvary Cemetery, superimposed against Manhattan, gives rise to a grand image of empire. Like an old city crumbling in the foreground of the new, its pathways converge on the sleek and towering metropolis on the horizon.

But at the metal gates along Greenpoint Avenue, the illusion suddenly ends. Hippodromes turn back into highways, and aqueducts into steel bridges.

Beyond the walls of the Old Calvary Cemetery, the Empire State Building can be seen prominently down most any street. Yet here the city seems bulky and out of scale, its buildings louder and larger than before. As the 7 train pulls into the station and rumbles back toward Times Square, the cemetery will begin to fade back into the grayish region it occupies on the subway map.