Canter’s Lowly Resting Place: Three Old Jewish Cemeteries Revisited

Often in historical research one stumbles upon something other than that which they were looking for. So it occurred recently while researching the history of Chatham Square, that resonant crossroads of schmaltz and duck fat, and the various crimes that have occurred nearby, I also found a story that illuminates another, more literal, underworld: that of Manhattan’s three Jewish cemeteries, and their remnants, which remain, often unnoticed, among us now.

My discovery was made in the New York Herald of Sunday, Dec. 3, 1893, in an un-bylined piece whose top headlines read:

FORGOTTEN GRAVES IN NEW YORK – Neglected Cemeteries of Other Generations Lying in the Heart of the City – CANTER’S LOWLY RESTING PLACE – Ancient Burial Spots Jealously Guarded by the Hebrew People, Who Never Forget Their Dead

“I think in all wide New York there is no more saddening spot than the grave of Canter, the Hebrew,” the reporter begins. “It lies in a quiet residence street just off one of the busiest thoroughfares of the so-called ‘shopping district.’ It is hidden, in a dense tangle of sprouts, at this season brown and sere.”

Though, mysteriously, we are told neither the name nor the exact location described, the writer’s next statement— “The plot is a triangular piece of land . . . ”—makes it clear we are on ground belonging to Congregation Shearith Israel, also known as the Spanish and Portuguese Synagogue, the oldest Jewish congregation in the United States.

The synagogue was founded in 1654 by some two dozen Spanish and Portuguese refugees in the Dutch colony of New Amsterdam. The Sephardic congregation first convened in the loft of a flour mill before moving, as the congregation grew, into three successive synagogues built in 1682, 1730, and 1818, none of which survive. The current Shearith Israel temple at West 70th Street and Central Park West opened in 1890.

What remains, however, is a fragment of the first Shearith Israel cemetery, opened in 1681, just steps from today’s Chatham Square in Chinatown. Two centuries after it was opened, in 1893 The Herald reporter who remarked on the grave of “Canter, the Hebrew” described the area—then part of the notorious Five Points district—as being “In the very haunts of dingy trade and traffic in things, like itself, ancient of days—old clothes, old furniture, stale beer saloons and rat ridden lodging houses. Overheard, high in air, flag in the breeze the week day washing of the tenement house dwellers, the elevated railway trains roar above; the hand organ man makes dismal, sobbing music a few feet away. . . . “

Yet, despite its triangular shape, Shearith Israel ‘s cemetery site is not Canter’s final resting place.

Street expansion, land sales, and other development compelled Shearith Israel to relocate numerous times. While some graves stayed behind, a second cemetery was established in 1805 on what was then the city’s outskirts but would become Greenwich Village. Two decades later, when the opening of 11th Street required many graves to be removed, a third Shearith Israel cemetery was opened on 21st Street, steps west of Sixth Avenue.

It was, even to writers of the later 19th century, a wonder that these three boneyards remained even partially intact. In 1875, The Jewish Messenger newspaper did a series on the city’s cemeteries, including the transcription of gravestone engravings that might otherwise have been lost to decay. Though the author of these pieces is unknown, it’s by their efforts we know Joshua Canter lay in Shearith Israel Cemetery No. 2.

On this unlikely spot just east of Sixth Avenue, our Herald reporter of 1893 observed, “Again and again attempts have been made to procure this pinch of ground for building purposes,” but all offers, from gentile and Jew alike, were ignored. “So it has been in the past, and so, doubtless it will be in the future. The plot, narrow and ugly as it is, desolate, uninviting, quiet neglected, will forever be held to extol the virtues of a race to whom it may be truly said, ‘They never forget the graves of their ancestors.’ ”

And yet . . . who was Canter? Even then, his weathered gravestone gave no indication, nor was his eminence such that it survived his passing.

His name was Joshua A. Canter, a portrait painter and art instructor, born in Denmark, likely in the latter half of the 18th century. In 1788, he emigrated to Charleston, S.C.—then home to the United States’s largest Jewish population—where he became notable in portraiture and art instruction. As Charleston’s economy faltered in the early 1820s, Canter moved to New York, where he died of unknown causes and was buried in 1826. While the city’s Jewish population remained small in those years, Canter’s life overlapped with the period when Jews began to take a more prominent role in New York’s public and political life.

Despite some scholarly interest, what might remain of Canter’s artwork is at present unidentified.