“Many of the wealthiest and most prominent Knickerbocker families in the City” were said to have ancestors interred in the Amity Street burial ground, and they were none too pleased by the church trustees’ decision to relocate the bodies. Trustees of the Madison Avenue Baptist Church, which had consolidated with the Oliver Street Church, purchased lots at Cypress Hills Cemetery and received permission from the city to exhume the bodies from the Amity Street burial ground for reinterment at Cypress Hills. In the 1860s, both the Oliver Street Baptist Church and the Amity Street Baptist Church followed the northward migration of residents and moved uptown, and the decision was made to sell the Amity Street property.
Newspaper notice announcing removal of remains from the Amity Street burial ground, Feb 17, 1863 A child, buried on Monday last, was interred just two feet three inches below the surface and there were ten new graves, in not one of which was the coffin three feet under the surface.” By 1849, the Amity Street Baptist burial ground was full-so full, in fact, that it closed soon after the City Inspector found, during a visit in July of that year, “the coffin in one grave was only two feet from the surface another, two feet four inches, and another, one foot ten inches. They buried some 1,200 congregants in their small Greenwich Village cemetery that was fenced in on the Amity and Wooster streets sides and bounded on the east by the Amity Street Baptist Church, an offshoot of the Oliver Street congregation that constructed their building in 1834 on an unused section of the cemetery land. The “old burying-ground” at the corner of Amity Street (later 3 rd Street) and Wooster was established in 1814 by the Fayette/Oliver Street Baptist Church formed in 1795, the Fayette/Oliver Street church was among Manhattan’s earliest Baptist congregations. The resting places wherein were interred (as was thought for all time) the remains of those of our progenitors who have passed from earth, are no longer yielded up to the silent dead the increase of business and population rendering the sites of their “narrow houses” more valuable to the mercantile and manufacturing community than when the practice of intramural interments was universal in Gotham…Among the other localities thus transformed, or to be transformed, is the old burying-ground corner of Amity and Wooster streets adjoining the Amity-street Baptist Church. The rapid march of improvement, which forms so distinguishing a characteristic of the Manhattanese, is daily removing or transforming the old landmarks that have been to this generation silent reminders of olden days and a Knickerbocker ancestry. In February 1863, the New York Times reported: Detail from and 1852 map showing the Amity Street Baptist Burial Ground at the corner of Amity (now 3rd Street) and Wooster streets
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