Washington Cemetery at right, 1943.

Perhaps best viewed from the elevated platform of the F train’s Bay Parkway Station, the Washington Cemetery is an 1850 historic burial ground founded as a result of the Rural Cemetery Act of 1847 (which allowed for commercial cemeteries outside the city limits). Within a decade of its establishment, the cemetery was largely catering to the Jewish community. The burial grounds are broken up into five gated areas, the oldest of which is seen here next to the el station. The whole cemetery encompasses 100 acres and is the final resting place of more than 200,000 persons.

The cemetery has been in the news a number of times in the last decade. In 2008 the cemetery announced that is had run out of plots, the first operating cemetery in the city to do so, prompting discussions of New York's burial overcrowding. In December of 2010, some 200 gravestones were overturned in series of vandalizations.