Political Leader Perfetto, Ex-Cemetery Commission Director, Summoned by Pastor To Help
By Harold Egeln
Brooklyn Eagle
BAY RIDGE — “Rest in Peace” is the wish of the living for the dead, but at the southwest corner of Fourth and Ovington avenues that phrase was in dispute between two opposing factions a week ago.
When the remains of 211 19th century Methodists were removed from the grounds of the Bay Ridge United Methodist Church, the community was embroiled in an ongoing preservationist struggle that has, at times, been anything but peaceful.
Activists and neighbors, distressed by the sight of caskets being removed from an underground vault facing Fourth Avenue, railed and despaired at the action last Thursday and protested with a daytime candlelight vigil, propping the Committee to Save the Bay Ridge United Methodist Church sign on the shrouded metal gate.
“I know that people would love to see the church saved,” said longtime Bay Ridge civic and political leader Ralph Perfetto. “But I understand how the church leaders had to deal with the situation of their church and the problems they faced. First and foremost, let me be clear, I’m not taking a position on the issue. But I was asked by Pastor Robert Emerick to help on the removal of the remains, as a volunteer advisor with professional experience in this area.”
Perfetto, an ombudsman for the city Public Advocate’s office and 60th AD Male Democratic District Leader, was the director of the city’s Cemetery Commission until the mid-1990s. Perfetto was selected, he said, because he knew the laws that govern removal of remains and the legal procedures that had to be followed.
The church’s trustees set a board meeting for March 31 to plan the removal and relocation of the bodies, buried at the site for a century. Pastor Emerick invited Perfetto, a Roman Catholic who is a parishioner at Our Lady of Angels, to attend the meeting.
Church Must Follow Laws For Gravesite Relocations
“Since a religious institution is involved, there has to be a meeting specifically held to make arrangements, with paper ballots cast and counted to make a decision on a removal,” Perfetto explained about the law governing religious institutional gravesites. “I informed them what must been done under the law and the process and procedures they must follow. Each paper ballot and relevant paper documents, such as for the city Department of Health, must be notarized, and we did that.”
There was space available on the Brooklyn section of the Cypress Hills Cemetery on Jamaica Avenue and Cypress Hills Street, below the Jackie Robinson Parkway. Director J. Peter Clavin of Clavin Funeral Home was asked to help arrange the removal and transfer of the remains to the 200-acre cemetery, set among some 20 cemeteries on the high hill that straddles Brooklyn and Queens.
The entire removal required up to six workers and a bulldozer to remove the sidewalk near the crypt. Then there was their transfer and reburial. The purchase price for the Cypress Hills plot was $100,000, paid by the trustees, Perfetto said.
“Everything had to be done in the strictest sense of the law,” he said. “I was asked to supervise the removal, and I was at the site from 7:45 in the morning until 3:30 p.m., when the work stopped. The work was done with dignity and with tedious caution until the last pouch of bones was reverently taken out, and the old vault was spotless.”
Perfetto is no stranger to the church site, as president of the Bay Ridge Mental Health Council since 1987. “Our Fort Hamilton Clinic of the South Beach Hospital was based in the brown brick school building on the site. We had a thrift shop there in the basement starting in the late 1980s.”
When the church undertook its clock tower repair fundraising project in the 1990s under parishioner Jim Thompson, Perfetto said he climbed into the steeple clock tower.
“I respect the contributions of people like [congregation member] Marge Sullivan who have made Bay Ridge, who has a history of civic involvement,” Perfetto said. “I also have the highest regard for devoted activists such as Victoria Hofmo and others who have their heart in their community and preservation work.”
But on the removal of the 211 human remains for which he was asked to help, he said, “The rights of the dead are inalienable.”
© Brooklyn Daily Eagle 2008
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