The ragged gravel parking lot in Elmhurst, Queens, looked like so many others scattered across the city — a squalid plot of open space cluttered with dozens of busted-up, broken-down cars and trucks. Some had been deposited there as part of the NYPD’s efforts to remove abandoned vehicles from city streets.
But just below the surface lay an uncomfortable truth: The owners, a limited liability corporation called 90 Queens LLC, had paved over what they knew to be a burial ground for freed African slaves dating at least to the early 1800s.
The fenced-off enclosure once served as the cemetery for the St. Mark African Methodist Episcopal Church in a Queens County haven for free Black people called Newtown. The bodies of as many as 290 formerly enslaved New Yorkers lie beneath the asphalt and impounded cars…