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Incorrect Date of Koch’s Birth on Tombstone

Four years before his death in February, Edward I. Koch commissioned a tombstone to serve as a monument to his achievements as New York City’s 105th mayor. He laid out precise instructions for the design and the inscriptions, and even inspected it himself when it was completed in 2009.

But Mr. Koch left the dates of his birth and death to be engraved after his burial, when he could no longer supervise the work.

This week, someone noticed that two numerals in the year of the mayor’s birth had been transposed. Instead of Dec. 12, 1924, the engraver carved 1942.

The mistake, reported on Monday by WNBC-TV, was made two weeks ago when the engraver, Tommy F. Flynn of Flynn Funeral & Cremation Memorial Centers Inc., was putting the final touches on Mr. Koch’s tombstone.

“I inverted 1924 to 1942, and I’m going to fix it,” Mr. Flynn said by telephone. “It was a simple human error.” He said it would be fixed within three weeks.

Mr. Flynn said he worked with Mr. Koch for eight months designing the granite tombstone. It includes the last words of Daniel Pearl, the reporter for The Wall Street Journal who was beheaded in 2002 by Islamist terrorists in Pakistan: “My father is Jewish, my mother is Jewish, I am Jewish.”

Mr. Flynn said both the date of the former mayor’s birth and his death were left blank, to be added after Mr. Koch’s burial. He died on Feb. 1 at age 88 and was buried at Trinity Church Cemetery in Washington Heights after an elaborate funeral.

Though Mr. Koch spent years meticulously preparing for his death — he planned his funeral, choosing a rabbi and potential speakers years in advance — Diane Coffey, his former chief of staff, said he would have been amused by the mix-up on his tombstone. “He always used to talk about how he had a 29-year-old brain,” she said. “So now he practically bought two decades.”

A version of this article appears in print on  , Section A, Page 18 of the New York edition with the headline: Incorrect Date Of Koch’s Birth On Tombstone. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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