Tag: cemetery

Edification value
Entertainment value
Should you go?
Time spent	219 minutes
Best thing I saw or learned	You never know who you’ll meet at Green-Wood.  For example, Do-Hum-Me, an Indian princess who came east with some of her tribe and died in New York.

I feel like I’m on thin ice with this one. There’s a fairly strong argument to be made that cemeteries are not museums. Start with the fact that they are called “cemeteries” and not “museums.” But bear with me here.

First off this isn’t the first cemetery I’ve visited on this project. A significant part of what makes Trinity Church important is its graveyard, and Trinity’s is relatively tiny.  Grant’s Tomb offers a lone voice trying to rehabilitate the General’s somewhat tattered reputation.  And the African Burial Ground seeks to recall those whom history has forgotten.

New York’s two great cemeteries, Green-Wood in Brooklyn and Woodlawn in the Bronx, represent an amazing convergence of art and architecture, landscape design, nature, and the people, famous, infamous, and not-famous-at-all, who over centuries have made New York City what it is. A stroll through a one of these vast and amazing places can be almost as edifying, and at least as entertaining, as going to a gallery or historic house (or certainly a botanical garden).

The great cemeteries were parks before the City had parks.  They provide a visceral a tie to the past that dusty displays at historical societies can’t match. Continue reading “Green-Wood Cemetery”