Grave situation at SI sailor’s cemetery

On Staten Island, the dead are spinning in their unmarked graves.

More than 100 old headstones are rotting in the basement of a building on the waterfront campus of the Snug Harbor Cultural Center, lifted decades ago from a cemetery containing the remains of 7,000 old salts who died between 1833 and 1975 when the complex housed retired sailors.

The tombstones were removed to protect them from vandals, but now no one knows where the dead are buried.

“I found it disturbing that there are gravestones in the basement,” said Lynn Rog- ers, executive director of Friends of Abandoned Cemeteries, which preserves forgotten graveyards on Staten Island.

Nick Dowen, a manager at the Noble Collection, where the tombstones are stored, said it’s “fairly common” for descendants of sailors buried in the cemetery to visit, “but it’s not like they can leave a flower. To find the exact location of the graves would be difficult.”

Ciro Galeno Jr., Noble executive director, said the approximately 120 headstones in storage are there for “safekeeping,” adding, “I don’t think it’s anybody’s fault that the grave markers aren’t there and we only have them here to preserve them.”

The center’s administrator, Jay Brooks said he has a map of where the lots are, but there is no way to tell exactly where the mariners are buried. “You can give a general proximity,” he said.