Second Asbury AME Cemetery

Date: 1850 to 1910
Location: Staten Island, Richmond, New York, United States
Surnames/tags: african_american new_york cemeteries

This cemetery - also known as the Cherry Lane Cemetery - was part of the Second Asbury AME Church that was founded on land deeded by John and Tabitha Blake in 1850. The congregation remained small, and by 1880, historian William T Davis noted that the cemetery had been vandalized and the church torn down.

Burials continued until about 1910, though the cemetery formed a board to oversee its maintenance. During the post-WWII development boom on Staten Island, however, the city illegally seized the land for non-payment of taxes and sold it for $1,000 at auction to a woman named Sidelle Mann, who then sold it to her brother, Edward Menden - a member of the Staten Island Historical Society - for $100.

In 1962 he property reverted to Sidelle when Edward and his wife were killed in a plane crash on takeoff from JFK (then Ildewild) Airport. She sold it to her cousin, Max Menden, a car salesman, for $75,000, and it was paved over and turned into a gas station. Since it was argued that this had not been a cemetery, no bodies were moved, including that of Benjamin Prine, the last person born into slavery on Staten Island.

In 1981 the property was bought by the Angiulli family who eventually turned it into the strip mall it is today. It's now owned by Sigma Realty, who bough it in 2005 for $4.5 million. The late Staten Island Borough Historian, Richard Dickenson, believed 90-1,000 people - including babies and children - are buried there. We know of 50. It's located at 1440 Forest Avenue.