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The Civic Scene: City should stop disrespecting cemeteries

By Bob Harris

At the recent rededication of the Fresh Meadows Library, Yoland Gallagher, the wife of Jim Gallagher who is president of the Fresh Meadows Homeowners Civic Association and of the 107th Precinct Community Council, started talking to me about her current interest in saving and rehabilitating the colonial Brinckerhoff/Adriance cemetery, also known as the Black Stump Cemetery of Flushing which dates back to 1730.

The site is an unfenced 45 x 120-foot tree and weed-covered lot on 82nd Street just north of 73rd Avenue. Gallagher, and a group of other civic leaders, contend that the city had no right to sell the site for unpaid taxes in 1957 because they knew it was a cemetery and you can