I was poking around the Internet earlier this week, looking for something to buy for our Green-Wood Historic Fund Collections, when I hit pay dirt with this photograph and bought it: This is a wire photo; here’s the caption attached to it that explains what you see above: The monuments in the background of the … Read more
The Green-Wood Historic Fund’s Civil War Project began in May, 2003. Since then, volunteers have obtained more than 2,000 gravestones for veterans who lie in unmarked graves. More than 1,300 of those gravestones have so far been installed by cemetery workers across Green-Wood’s grounds. The veterans administration offers a variety of monuments: flat bronze, marble, … Read more
Intro text here… Before photos are on the left-hand side, after photos on the right. Click on an image to expand — you can then toggle between the expanded before and after images using your left/right arrow keys. Caption here Caption here Caption here Caption here Caption here Caption here … Read more
George Catlin (1796-1872) devoted much of his life to painting the American Indian. Starting in the 1820s, he went west to paint men and women whom he believed to be on the edge of extinction. He went west for years at a time, driven by his dream and his mission. He painted many tribes, including … Read more
Green-Wood is many things to many people. For some, it is a place of history. To others, it is a bird-watcher’s paradise. To still others, it is an arboretum; others think of it as a garden. And others think of it as a great big classroom. Last week, a guest artist and two instructors from … Read more
We have a new Historic Fund volunteer–Patty. She was interested in doing something, and, it turned out, she is quite the genealogical researcher. Once I learned that, I suggested that she might do follow-up research on the biographies of some of our Civil War veterans, looking for census entries, obituaries, and more, to improve their … Read more
Fifteen years ago, at the end of a Green-Wood tour that I was leading, a gentleman approached me, pulled out a photograph of a drawing, and asked me if there was a monument at Green-Wood that looked like that. I immediately recognized it as the Pierrepont Family Memorial. It turned out that the man with … Read more
Walter Dorwin Teague (1883-1960) was one of the giants of 20th century industrial design. Over a long career, he designed several popular art deco cameras for Eastman Kodak, art deco radios, lamps, and even World’s Fair pavilions. In 1927, Teague opened one of the first industrial design firms in the nation. During the 1930s, his … Read more
Two of Green-Wood’s permanent residents, Louis Comfort Tiffany and John La Farge, were pioneers of American stained glass in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Tiffany and his studio were prolific–they so dominated stained glass lamp manufacturing that virtually any stained glass lamp, whether by Tiffany or someone else, is now referred to as … Read more
One hundred years ago, in July of 1911, reform Mayor William J. Gaynor ended tolls on New York City’s East River bridges. As the mayor said back then, “the tolls are oppressive to many people, and inconvenient and irksome to everyone.” As Sam Roberts notes in his recent New York Times report, Gaynor thought tolls were … Read more