In Foreign Parts: New life for the marble marvels of an American way of death

The extravagance and eccentricity of the American Way of Death have long been targets of the satirist's pen. Jessica Mitford's immortal phrase, the title of her 1963 exposé of the working practices of the funeral business in the United States, stands out in a tradition peopled by Evelyn Waugh's The Loved One (1948) and, most recently, the cult television series, Six Feet Under.

A bizarre chapter in this tradition has come to light in the revival of the New York Marble Cemetery.

Deep in Manhattan's Bowery district, in what was once a rural sward, the extraordinary half acre of marble-clad cemetery was laid out by Perkins Nichols in 1830.

The cemetery plots, at $250 a time, were taken by men who were then turning New York into a centre of world trade and capital: George Griswold, the leader, with his brother Nathaniel, of America's tea-clipper trade with China; Pierre Lorillard, the tobacco king, and first American to be called "millionaire"; Benjamin Wright, the father of American civil engineering, and many founders of the city's most celebrated universities, schools and hospitals.

But no sooner was the cemetery established than it fell out of fashion. Americans had discovered a taste for rural interment. The New York Marble Cemetery was engulfed by the spread of tenement housing even as Green-Wood, in Brooklyn, and other leafy burial grounds began to spring up in the late 1830s.

In a measure against the spread of yellow fever, the burial rooms of the Marble Cemetery (using the Tuckahoe marble employed at the Capitol building and other Washington monuments) had been built below ground. As the century progressed, and the Bowery became a byword for the poverty-stricken slums of immigrants, the children and grandchildren of the founding families moved their forebears' coffins to rural cemeteries in more salubrious settings.

In 1905, there were formal moves to abolish the cemetery, and the founders' descendants set up an endowment fund.

Neighbours as well as city officials had alternative ambitions for the place, most notably the pioneering photographer and philanthropist Jacob Riis, who saw it as a space for local children to play in. As a police reporter, his photographs of the urban poor had already alerted the well-off world to the crowded squalor in which the other half lived in New York.

But the takeover ambitions of the well-meaning as well as the avaricious have always been thwarted by the peculiar ownership of the cemetery. By the city legislation that established it, the cemetery belongs to the original owners of the burial plots and their descendants. It can be sold only if all living descendants agree. So the cemetery remained in the hands of family trustees.

Largely unseen and unnoticed down its alleyway entrance from Second Avenue, it grew increasingly careworn, the 12ft walls collapsing, a home to dead cats, illegal barbecues, draped in unregulated power cables and thick with waist-high weeds.

The neglect might have continued but for the enthusiasm of the present trustees, who have reversed the cemetery's fortunes with a restoration appeal that paid for the repair of the walls.

The cemetery is now a New York City Landmark, listed on the National Register of Historic Places. More than 2,000 of the descendants of the original plot-owners have been traced and the cemetery's website (www.marblecemtery.org) may yet produce thousands more. There could be up to 200,000.

For Sophia Truslow, trustee, attorney, formidable polymath and chief fund-raiser, the cemetery is a unique pantheon of the men who made New York the centre of world trade. Their cemetery was an austere, non-denominational survival of the Greek revival style, a place where the families who lived in the neo-Classical developments in and around Washington Square would be happy to end their days, a symbol of a political idealism that found itself in conflict with the hubris of empire 70 years later.

The individual plots are marked by tablets hanging on the walls, stacked in columns, giving the graveyard, the feeling of a Greek temple. The rubble and marble walls, collapsed in places where the foundations have been dug away from outside, sturdy in others, are built using a Greek bond method.

The cemetery is notable for the spare beauty with which it remembers the families: the plainly carved name of a founding father – Auchincloss, Beeckman, Kernochan, Ogden, Scribner, Vandervoort, van Wyck – like the commander of a Roman legion, with no space left for additional names, no quaint epithets.

It is hauntingly appropriate that the artist Julian LaVerdiere, descended from four of the original plot-owners, helped to create the towers of light on the site of the World Trade Centre in May this year. In his hands, the American way of death came full circle, to the style of almost abstract classicism with which this half-acre was mapped out 172 years ago.