The stones propped up along the walls are some of the last links to the old Frankish burial ground in the Grand Champs des Morts, Pera's 'Great Field of the Dead', which was lost to urban development during the 19th century.

The urban development in the Ottoman capital, influenced by Western models, led to the closure of the Grand Champs des Morts – Istanbul's `City of the Dead', a world-renowned necropolis, which had provided inspiration, as well as an ideal, for the cemetery reformers of Europe.

One of the founders of the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions to the Armenians at Istanbul, Goodell had lost his nine-year-old son, Constantine Washington, to typhoid fever in 1841 and buried him in the Frankish section of the Grand Champs des Morts.

In July 1863, the remains of more than a dozen Americans, including those of Constantine Washington Goodell, were exhumed from the old Frankish burial ground in the Grand Champs des Morts.

The land occupied by the former burial ground was turned into a public park (in a modern Western sense), a project finally completed six years later with the opening of Taksim Garden in 1869.