Vault Hill

Augustus Van Cortlandt hid city records under Vault Hill to protect them during the Revolutionary War, turning them over to the new American government after the war. In 1781 Washington's and Rochambeau's troops waited on what is now the Parade Ground and Vault Hill while the generals strategized inside the Van Cortlandt House. The hill's headstones and crypts were vandalized in the 1960s, noted by a New York Times reader as early as 1962.