Thomas MacMillan Photo
Years ago, when Tony Griego first started working security at the Yale-New Haven Hospital emergency room, he used to tell people that there was a long-forgotten cemetery underground nearby. “They all laughed at me,” he said.
Nobody’s laughing now.
Not since construction workers excavating for an addition to the ER on York Street came across skeletal remains Monday.
Griego, a former cop, wasn’t working Monday, but he got the call and rushed down to see the proof of what he’d known for years.
Bellantoni.
Nicholas Bellantoni, the state archaeologist, also got a call. He was on the scene Monday afternoon unloading tools from his pick-up truck as he prepared to excavate the remains with mentees from UConn.
Bellantoni said he’ll analyze the site, determine the age of the remains along with any other information he can glean and then remove them for reburial.
He said the workers stopped immediately as soon as the remains were discovered. As he walked toward the site, Bellantoni explained to the students what they’d be doing. “We’ll set up a line and take some depths,” he said. Then they’d be analyzing the soil by color and mapping the site, he went on.
Behind a chain-link fence, Bellantoni and crew descended into a pit. Bellantoni, who asked that the remains not be photographed, pointed out what he was seeing.
Griego.
“See this?” he said, pointing to what he said was a “cranium.” He explained that the head was pointing west, which was typical for old Christian graveyards. It was so that they could be resurrected properly on judgment day, he said, showing with gestures how they would rise from the dead.
“We’ve got some arm bones here, some leg bones here,” Bellantoni said, before helping his mentees lay out a tape.
Moments later, outside the fence, Griego, wearing his Connecticut Gravestone Network T‑shirt, shared his research into the site. A 69-year-old former cop and self-described history buff, Griego said a human skull was pulled out of the same area back in 1979. He produced a New Haven Register article about the incident, in which repofter Dan Kaferle detailed the discovery of two skulls behind Captapano’s Auto Body Shop on Kimberly Avenue. The skulls were found where dump trucks had deposited fill taken from the site of what is now the Yale-New Haven Hospital ER.
“I knew before then that it was a cemetery,” Griego said. He had pieced it together with the help of an old book that a friend picked up at a tag sale, he said. The book told the history of the first Catholic church in New Haven, and said it had an graveyard that was used between 1833 and 1851.
Monday’s discovered remains will “more than likely” date from that time period, Griego said.
“The sad thing is, they’ll probably never be identified,” Griego said. He said he wrote to the archdiocese a while ago and was told that no cemetery records exist from the church.
Griego said his research had turned up only two names of people buried in the cemetery. He pulled out a second article, written by him in 2003. It describes a tragic collapse of the church’s gallery on its dedication day May 8 1834. A boy, Abraham Lloyd Bryan died in the accident. His grandfather, Mr. Hardyear, died the following day, after making a dying request that he and his grandson be buried together in the same grave in the church’s cemetery.
Could that be the same plot that construction workers discovered Monday, 177 years later?
“I doubt it,” Griego said.
Great story. The hospital should install a plaque illustrating the history of the area, before it was turned into a concrete jungle.