St Patrick's Old Cathedral: Historic church selling plot in crypt for $7m

The funds would go to restoring a massive pipe organ held together with 'tape and string'

Chris Hondros/Getty

Even in death, New York City’s real estate prices could cost its residents millions should they choose to rest in peace in a crypt below the city’s first cathedral.

New Yorkers – or really anybody who has $7m (£5.3m) to spare – can reserve a plot beneath the historic Saint Patrick’s Old Cathedral, a 200 year old church in Lower Manhattan.

For that money the church is offering a six-person family vault, the first time such a prime position has been made available to the public.

The exorbitant prices may seem to go against the values of Pope Francis, who is known for his humility and scathing indictments of lavish spending, but St Patrick’s Old Cathedral staff assure that the money is going to a good cause.

Frank Alfieri, director of the church cemetery, told the New York Post that the funds are needed to repair a massive pipe organ in the cathedral.

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“It is being held together with tape and thread,” he told Pix 11. “It needs a million dollars to be repaired.”

So rather than hold a number of fundraisers, the church decided to offer vault for the $7m donation.

The upside, Mr Alfieri told the New York Post, is that anybody who chooses the vault as their final resting place will be among “people that set the Catholic faith in motion in New York”.

Among the buried beneath the church are the first bishop of New York, John Connolly; New York congressman John Kelly; adviser to Abraham Lincoln, Gen Thomas Eckert; and Johnny “Cha Cha” Ciarcia, a restaurant owner and de facto president of Little Italy whose ashes were stored at St Patrick’s last year for $10,000.