At the junction of 5th Avenue and Broadway, in New York (at about 23rd Street), there is a monument to General William Jenkins Worth, a general from the Mexican-American War days. The city of Fort Worth, Texas is named after him.
I heard a rumor that he was actually buried at that spot. Unfortunately, I can’t seem to find any verification of that (or some other burial site).
In reality, I have two questions:
(1) Is General Worth really buried there at the junction of 5th Avenue and Broadway.
(2) If he is buried there - how was that odd site chosen as his burial place rather than in a standard cemetary?
I like Worth’s Monument, but mostly because it gives a good view of my fav building - the Fuller (Flatiron) building.
Forgotten NY is a bit ambiguous on the subject here saying “his remains may have been transferred” there, due to the difference in death date and date of the monument’s erection.
Fortunately, our great city has the full story on it’s parks page. Apparently he was interred at Green-Wood Cemetery in Brooklyn before being moved to the current location.
As for your second question… No clue, but I’ll keep looking.
On a tangential note, Confederate General A. P. Hill’s monument and burial spot is in the middle of an intersection here in Richmond. He was killed near Petersburg, but buried at the present spot before it was anything other than a bucolic spot on the way to Richmond. In Hill’s case, he was buried and the City grew up around him. Such doesn’t seem to be the case in Worth’s situation - it sounds as if he was buried right in the middle of the street after the street was there. That is odd.
I work around the corner from Worth Square. At lunch today I stopped by to check it out.
On the back of the monument there is a large plaque that states:
I didn’t have a shovel with me, and I think that certain City employees would take an adverse interest in me were to I do any more in depth research, so that’s the best I can do. If you can believe the plaque, he’s there.
Maybe not so much as you might think. Manhattan only very slowly grew northward during the 19th century. Poe, who also died in 1849, for example, lived during his final decade on a farmhouse way out on the deserted countryside–in the West 80s . Aaron Burr’s “country estate” some fifty years earlier was located in what is now Greenwich Village (around Varick and King streets, I believe). I’m not sure of the exact status of Madison Square in the early 1850s but it certainly wasn’t as urbanized as you’re probably thinking.