Letchworth Village Cemetery
After we explored a few buildings in Letchworth Village, we decided to call it quits despite barely making a dent because 1. we saw a cop, 2. I was getting hangry and 3. we needed to get our Zip Car back to the city by 9pm. We still had a bit of time before it was absolutely necessary that we start heading back, however, and I'm always angling to squeeze one last thing into a day spent exploring.
To remedy the hangry issue, we stopped at Hoyer's, a circa-1933 ice cream stand in the nearby town of Haverstraw. I used a $10 bill I found in one of the buildings (I'm still pumped about that find) to buy us soft serve and a root beer float which was exactly what we needed after creeping around for hours in hot, humid and probably asbestos-laden buildings. After Hoyer's, I suggested that we make just one more stop—technically on the way home!—and try our luck at finding the Letchworth Village Cemetery.
When I had initially googled "Letchworth Village," one of the auto-fill suggestions was "Letchworth Village Cemetery" and I I knew that finding it could be the cherry on top of an already perfect day. I'm eternally frustrated by the lack of location information available online sometimes—maybe I'm just a greedy millennial, but I feel that locations that are open to the public and amenable to visitors should not be so hard to pinpoint on a map.
The closest directions I could find were "drive down Call Hollow Road until you come to a path in the woods," which is what we ended up doing. Thankfully there's a bright blue sign for the cemetery and Call Hollow isn't a long road but I still took the time to figure out as close to the exact location as I could in hopes that it might help someone else one day be less frustrated that I was—405 Call Hollow Road, Stony Point, NY 10980 should get you there.
There's a small gravel clearing near the sign where you can park, and the cemetery is just a short walk through the path into the woods. This particular cemetery was used from 1914-1967 and while it contains a handful of traditional tombstones, most of the graves are marked with a simple, numbered metal marker. Names weren't used to assure the anonymity of the patients (or, in a lot of cases, their families), although a plaque has recently been added to include the names of those interred here—still not matched to their numbers but under the heading "Those Who Shall Not Be Forgotten."
This was a cemetery unlike any I have visited before, which is a distinction I keep thinking I'll no longer be able to make—until I come across yet another unique way to handle a burial space. Seeing rows and rows of graves marked with nothing but a number is sad in a way that traditional cemeteries usually aren't and even the graves marked with tombstones are sobering when you realize that people didn't seem to live long lives at Letchworth.
