One of the city's oldest bus depots will shut down in January — nearly seven years after construction workers first discovered a 17th-century African burial ground there, sources confirmed.
The closure of the 126th Street Depot in East Harlem will pave the way for a slave memorial as well as the possibility of residential development on the site, said City Council Speaker Melissa Mark-Viverito, whose district covers the area.
"This is an incredible opportunity," she said. "We've already started to work on [the memorial] . . . Residential is a thought, but it has to be done in a respectful way."
The depot, between First and Second avenues, is expected to close for good on Jan. 5, the same day drivers are assigned new routes and schedules for 2015, according to a Transport Workers Union official who learned of the plan from MTA brass.
The MTA planned in 2010 to upgrade the dilapidated depot starting next year, but community demands to convert the site into a memorial scuttled that. A Hunter College report commissioned by the Harlem African Burial Ground Task Force — which Mark-Viverito helped form — recommended "bus-depot relocation" in the fall of 2011.
Once the MTA is out of the 126th Street Depot, which opened in 1947 as a trolley yard, the site will revert back to city control under a lease agreement between the two, the MTA source said.
The land — once home to Harlem's first house of worship, the Elmendorf Reformed Church, from 1665 until 1869 — started as a cemetery after Peter Stuyvesant ordered African slaves to build a 9-mile road from lower Manhattan to what was then an unincorporated part of the city known as Nieuw Haarlem.
"It's a little early to figure out what we'll do," said City Councilman David Greenfield, who heads the council's Land Use Committee. "But we want to make sure that this piece of history — an important part of New York City history — will be preserved."
The land's value is difficult to determine, but parcels like it have doubled in price during the past two years, said Lev Kimyagarov, the East Harlem Director of Sales at Massey Knakal Realty Services.
"Demand is across the board," he said. "Any vacant land in Harlem is a hot commodity now."
Before any construction can begin on a memorial or housing, an excavation will have to take place. Mark-Viverito contends the MTA will help with that. The agency declined to comment.
"There's nothing to announce at this time," said MTA spokesman Adam Lisberg.
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