Stuyvesant's Street Mystery Cache
Sapience Trek: No response from owner. If you wish to repair/replace the cache sometime in the future, just contact us (by email), and assuming it meets the current guidelines, we'll be happy to unarchive it.
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Difficulty:
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Terrain:
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Size: 
(small)
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Saint Mark's-in-the-Bowery Church was erected in 1660 on the farm
of Peter Stuyvesant, Governor of New Amsterdam, where his family,
his neighbors, and their slaves worshipped every Sunday. "Bouwerij"
is old NYC Dutch for farm. It is the oldest site of continuous
worship in New York City. The listed coordinates will bring you
here, this is a puzzle cache, so the cache is somewhere else.
Solving the puzzle will enable you to find the cache, which is
hidden elsewhere in this Bowery.
The graveyard and vaults were in use between 1670 and 1851. By
1969, the burial ground was a garbage dump and a haven for drug
addicts. That year, Reverend J. C. Michael Allen, pastor of Saint
Mark's, spearheaded an effort to transform the graveyard into a
playground. Allen told the New York Times, "A few people
have complained to me about the cemetery project, but I don't think
they understand. There are many ways to honor the dead, but for me
and the anguished people who are my parishioners, I think the best
way to honor them is not to die with them, but to live with
them."
Approximately thirty teenagers were hired to help build the new
playground. The yard was paved with cobblestones that were laid out
in a circular design about the gravestones, crypt entrances, and
trees. The West church yard, where these improvements were made,
remains available for community events, but closed to the general
public, in order to protect the landscaping. The East church yard
is open to the general public during the day, and contains the well
known graves of Peter Stuyvesant, and Daniel Tompkins. There are
various plaques describing the many families buried here and the
history of St. Marks Church. We placed the cache near the corner of
Judith Street, using
Stuyvesant's Grid. We took the "Gray" number from William
Coleman's vault added it to the Edward Higgins Family vault number
and came up with the last three digits of the Longitude. After
studying where the grid starts, we realized that when the city
started marking off 25' x 100' lots, the last three digits of the
year was the same as the last three digits of the latitude of this
cache.
You can check your answers for this puzzle on
Geochecker.com.
Additional Hints
(Decrypt)
Fgebat sbeprf ng jbex. Fuvryqrq sebz jrngure.
Treasures
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