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Wednesday, May 1, 2019

Mining Grayfields for Gold?


Near "I' and E. Venango Streets 



Mining Grayfields for Gold?

Anybody know the current status of Harrowgate Plaza? Heard it was an urban eyesore some time back. How many years since Acme moved out? The thing is that it used to be a cemetery - Belvue and or Bellvue, spelled differently in places. Back in the early seventies I was walking by the plaza at street level after a heavy rain. And the plaza was elevated, the parking lot like ten or fifteen feet above street level just like the Cemetery had been. A chunk of the parking lot, about 20 sq feet and the dirt under it had collapsed out over the support wall onto the sidewalk. And there was a red granite gravestone on the sidewalk. I walked up to it and the name was something like Ann Pitchie Hogg. Real strange sounding name which I could never find in any newspaper clippings or census records. Did I dream this? This all was before I knew that the plaza had been a successful Victorian Cemetery. The mess on the sidewalk was there for a few days and the stone too. Management and or the city was not too quick to clean this stuff up back then etc. The urban myth is that they reburied the bones of those unlucky enough to be buried under the parking lot of a future Philly strip mall someplace else like in the corner of some distant burb cemetery. In the case of Monument Cemetery on Broad Street (below link), they dumped a lot of headstones from Monument Cemetery onto the banks of the Delaware River as landfill after they used the land for a parking lot at Temple University. So when Harrowgate Plaza eventually gives up the ghost, I bet you could get the land cheap and then dig up all the gravestones I bet they never bothered to use elsewhere, using them as landfill instead for the new Harrowgate Plaza strip mall. Good money to be made on selling the stones as garden ornaments or sell them back to the descendants of the jerks stupid enough to have bought in on that 19th century Cemetery con job. Resting place forever - yeah right etc. 

Just saying. 





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