In downtown Newark on Halsey Street, in the shadow of the Prudential Tower, Rutgers University through the agency of RBH Project, LLC is nearing completion of its new Honors Living-Learning Center. This major addition to the Rutgers-Newark campus, bounded by Washington, New, Halsey and Linden Streets, encompasses almost an entire block in the city’s historic core and lies within the James Street Commons Historic District. In the center of the block there used to be a cemetery associated with the Halsey Street Methodist Episcopal Church, Newark’s first Methodist house of worship, established in 1808-09. Interments were made in the cemetery from early in the 19th century until around 1870. In the 1920s, all burials were supposedly removed to make way for a parking lot for the nearby Hahne’s department store.
As so often happens, the disinterment of bodies from abandoned cemeteries was haphazard and far from complete.Over the course of ten months in 2017, Hunter Research painstakingly removed no less than 335 burials, including 138 largely complete skeletons, many jumbled reinterments (including a group of children in a single box) and several partial disinterments (left-overs from the 1920s parking lot episode).In September 2018, after exhaustive analysis in the Hunter Research and Monmouth University laboratories, all human remains were transported to Hollywood Cemetery in Union, New Jersey and ceremonially reburied.A report on this complex archaeological endeavor, one of very few comprehensively reported cemetery excavations in New Jersey, was completed in the spring of 2019 and is available here.