The MTA will likely shut down its East Harlem bus depot because it sits atop a 17th-century African burial ground, two transit sources told The Post.
The 126th Street facility — home to the M15 fleet that traverses Second Avenue, the city's busiest bus route — could close permanently as early as June, one of the sources revealed.
The Post first reported three years ago that the agency had confirmed the existence of the burial ground, used by Harlem's first house of worship, the Elmendorf Reformed Church, from 1665 until 1869 to bury slaves and freed slaves.
Community activists began lobbying to relocate the 67-year-old depot, a former trolley yard, to memorialize the cherished ground and even establish a cultural center around it. At the time, the MTA maintained it would continue to study the issue but planned to go ahead with the refurbishment of the depot in 2015.
Now the agency appears ready to wash its hands of the 104,000-square-foot building, sources said.
"It's impractical to close down this depot. It's going to disrupt service," said J.P. Patafio, an official with Transport Workers Union Local 100. "They should put up a monument."
A report commissioned by the Harlem African Burial Ground Task Force from Hunter College recommended "bus depot relocation" in the fall of 2011 "to provide space for the proper memorialization of the burial ground."
MTA spokesman Kevin Ortiz would only say the authority hasn't made any decision on the depot's fate. A report completed by the MTA in February 2013 shows it has considered "renovation, rehabilitation or replacement" and noted the site could be subject to "redevelopment."
The burial ground's history dates to 1658, when New Amsterdam's Dutch governor, Peter Stuyvesant, ordered African slaves to build a nine-mile road from lower Manhattan to what was then known as Nieuw Haarlem. Two years later, the First Reformed Church of Harlem — which would later become Elmendorf — was founded, and in 1665 it set aside land for a "Negro burying ground," according to the Hunter College report.
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