Green-Wood Cemetery

“By the 1860s, only Niagara Falls was drawing more visitors annually than Green-Wood. Twenty years before Central Park, the cemetery was effectively New York’s first great urban playground.” Brooklyn: The Once and Future City by Thomas J. Campanella

In Brooklyn there is a 478-acre plot that looks more like a pleasure park than an urban burial ground. Built on a hillside overlooking New York and the Statue of Liberty, Green-Wood Cemetery offers valleys, ponds, winding paths, old trees and a large population of monk parrots. In 2006 it was declared a National Historic Landmark and, though it may not be as wildly popular a tourist attraction as it was in the 1860’s, it still draws visitors interested in history, nature and a brief escape from hot concrete.

The City of Immortals

The idea of a garden cemetery now seems obvious, but back then it was revolutionary, French Revolutionary, to be exact. Père Lachaise Cemetery was the prototype. In the early nineteenth century, Napoleon wanted to encourage the construction of egalitarian cemeteries just outside the city limits of Paris. One of the plots chosen for this project was the former country retreat of the Sun King’s father confessor Francoise de La Chaise. A competition held for the privilege of designing the cemetery was won by Alexandre-Théodore Brongniart, who had a novel idea. He decided to retain the country-garden feel of the priest’s estate. Instead of the cramped bunch of headstones familiar in churchyards, he created a space reminiscent of an English garden. It felt expansive and beautiful, with meandering paths, spreading trees and impressive architecture.

Initially Père Lachaise was an unpopular choice because it was far from the city center and not consecrated by the Catholic Church. In 1804, after the illustrious remains of Molière and Jean de la Fontaine were transplanted there, it became much more popular. By the time The Count of Monte Cristo was published, for example, the ruthless social climber Monsieur de Villefort considers it the only possible choice for a respectable Parisian family. These days it’s one of the most famous cemeteries in the world, the so-called City of Immortals.

Sweet Auburn and Laurel Hill

Along with Empire necklines, neo-classical architecture and fresh ideas about Liberty, the French fashion in cemeteries soon made it way to the United States. In 1825, Boston physician and botanist Jacob Bigelow called a meeting to discuss the idea of establishing a rural cemetery on the city outskirts. One of a growing number of people who considered overcrowded city cemeteries to be a public health risk, he was interested in the idea of combining a great graveyard with a garden. He had his way and pretty soon the city had acquired a beautiful hilly piece of land and improved with meandering paths, trees, flowers and fountains.

Mount Auburn Cemetery, aka Sweet Auburn, was consecrated in 1831 and soon became the burying ground of choice for Boston’s best and brightest, to the point that there were grumbles about elitism, especially because of the inordinate cost of some of the plots. Famous bones interred herein include those of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, James Russell Lowell and illustrator Charles Dana Gibson (responsible for the Gibson Girls). Sculptors chiselled creative monuments like this one, a marble dog watching over the tomb of the Perkins family. Thomas Handasyd Perkins was considered the ‘Merchant Prince’ of China trade and dabbled in trading slaves, furs and Turkish opium (he smuggled it into China).

Sweet Auburn became so popular that dozens of other similar cemeteries popped up in imitation throughout the country. One of the most famous of these is Laurel Hill Cemetery in Philadelphia, consecrated in 1838. This 32-acre property had formerly been the county seat of merchant Joseph Simms and was north of the city, overlooking the river Schuylkill. Scottish architect John Notman designed it to resemble an English estate garden, a transition between art and nature. From the mid-1800s, visitors and funeral-goers could take a steamboat there the better to drink in the scenery. It was expected that, once there, they would enjoy the area with picnics, strolls and carriage rides along the cemetery paths.

This was the final resting place of Sarah Josepha Hale, the person who made Thanksgiving and penned “Mary Had a Little Lamb”, and David Rittenhouse, astronomer, mathematician, clock-maker and first director of the US Mint.

Boston vs. The Big Apple

Boston and New York have had a tense relationship dating way back to buckled hats and New Amsterdam.  Boston was Puritan and English, New York was chaotic and Dutch. Both are port cities and after the Revolutionary War, they competed fiercely for trade. Finally, in 1825, New York got a leg up with the opening of the Eerie Canal.

It was then, just as New York the underdog was turning into the overdog, that Brooklyn was coming into being. Henry Evelyn Pierrepont was the New York city planner charged with laying out streets for the new city of Brooklyn. He had been impressed by Mount Auburn and the moment received his new commission, he was abroad visiting historic cemeteries in France and Italy for inspiration. He gained the authority to set aside land for a cemetery and bought a sprawling tract of high ground (478 acres) that was about 220 feet above sea level and afforded spectacular views of the harbor and New York.

The cemetery was chartered as a joint-stock corporation on April 11, 1838. The stockholders nearly dubbed it ‘Necropolis’ but decided instead on Green-Wood because they wanted a brand that evoked repose, verdure, shade, ruralness and natural beauty. Work began in 1839 and the first interment was of a man named John Hanna.

It soon became a popular destination for outings. In fact, it was the only public park near the city at that time as Central Park and Prospect Park had yet to be designed. As far as an eternal resting place, it was initially less popular. In its first three years there were only 400 burials. Then Green-Wood took a page out of Père Lachaise’s book and hosted a celebrity re-interment. DeWitt Clinton had been an American politician and naturalist as well as the Governor of New York, during which time he’d overseen the construction of the Erie Canal. He died suddenly in 1828, leaving his family in such a poor financial situation that they could not afford a grave for him and a friend had offered the use of his family tomb. Now, ten years later, he received a burial more appropriate to his contribution to New York public life.

A Bit of Birdland

A particularly striking aspect of the cemetery are arches at the cemetery entrance. They were designed by Richard Upjohn and his son Richard M. Upjohn, architects also responsible for Gothic Revival churches throughout New York. The arches today host an extensive nest of monk parrots. How these Argentine natives ended up colonizing Brooklyn is a murky story, but they are now well and truly established and one of the cemetery’s star attractions. And parrots aren’t the only ones to call the burial ground home–local birders are rewarded with sightings of many different species such as Hooded Warblers, Double-Crested Cormorants, Ovenbirds, Kingfishers and Scarlet Tanagers as the blog ROWHOUSESPARROWS attests.

Monumental Memories

The cemetery is a kind of three-dimensional history book that remembers the events and people of Brooklyn from its early days right up to the present. Over the course of the nineteenth century, Brooklyn expanded rapidly from humble beginnings as a village. Finally, in 1898, it merged with other boroughs to form Greater New York City.

Actually, the history of the site predates the cemetery because it was a scene of conflict in the Revolutionary War, the Battle of Long Island. A nearby tavern is called Battle Hill Tavern after the fight, and history buffs regularly visit the cemetery specifically to see the nationally significant ground.

Apart from that, the Civil War is a palpable presence in Green-Wood. Grave plots were offered for free to veterans. Between 1868 and 1876, a 35-foot high Civil War Soldiers’ monument was erected at the cemetery’s highest point. Today, the graves of soldiers are sometimes marked with small flags. Although Brooklyn was known, even more than New York, for its pro-Union sentiment, there are even a few Confederate veterans.

A particularly awful event that is also commemorated here is the Brooklyn Theater Fire of December 5, 1876. Almost 300 people died and many of them were buried in a mass grave that took 42 diggers to create. An obelisk was erected at the site. One of the survivors was the famous actress Kate Claxton, who later got a reputation for being bad luck because she also survived a hotel fire in St. Louis. Claxton lived to the age of 76 and was eventually buried in Green-Wood.

There are too many important individuals resting here to name, but a few will suffice. William C. Kingsley may not be a household name, but he was more or less personally responsible for one of the borough’s most famous landmarks: the Brooklyn Bridge. He also published The Brooklyn Eagle, which was the borough’s major daily newspaper in his day.

There is Brooklyn’s first mayor, George Hall, and its last (before it become part of New York City), Frederick Wurster. There’s the guy who invented the hot dog (German butcher Charles Feltman) and George Tilyyou, who founded Coney Island’s Steeplechase Park. President of the Brooklyn Dodgers Charles Ebbets, Henry Chadwick ‘the father of baseball’, William Colgate (of toothpaste fame), Henry Steinway and Charles Pfizer–a chemist whose firm grew into the huge international research and manufacturing corporation now known as Pfizer Inc.

In short, if you ever get to Brooklyn, Green-Wood is a great place to visit for all kinds of reasons: history-drinking, bird-watching, breeze-finding or view-gazing.