Jeff Richman As the baseball season moves into full stride, it is a good time to remember Green-Wood’s permanent residents who played such a prominent role in the creation of the National Pastime. What other place has four men who claimed to have been “The Father of Baseball?” I was interviewed last week by Mark Morales of … Read more
April 15, 2012 is the 100th anniversary of the sinking of the Titanic. This past Saturday, Joe Edgette, who has been studying the Titanic and its passengers for many years, and is also expert on all things cemetery, led a tour of Green-Wood’s Titanic-related sites. Our trolley and caboose were full–this tour sold out weeks … Read more
Ben Feldman is fascinated by Green-Wood’s permanent residents. He has written two books, both of which were about individuals who lie at Green-Wood: Butchery on Bond Street: Sexual Politics and the Burdell-Cunningham Case in Ante-bellum New York, and Call Me Daddy: Babes and Bathos in Edward West Browning’s Jazz Age New York. Ben blogs as … Read more
You don’t have to be a weatherman, or even a cemetery historian, to know that winter 2011-2012 barely made an appearance, and that spring it up and blooming. Looking at photographs I took last year, it seems to me that we are about 10 days earlier with blooms this year than last. I took these … Read more
On Saturday, students from Shimoda, Japan, visited New York City. A must-see of their tour of the Big Apple: Townsend Harris’s Green-Wood grave. They were joined by students and a teacher from Townsend Harris High School in Queens. So what is that all about? Why would anyone travel halfway around the world to New York … Read more
On December 16, 2010, The Green-Wood Historic Fund dedicated a granite and bronze monument to the memory of those who had died when two airplanes collided over Staten Island fifty years earlier. For an account of that dedication, click here. It was quite a moving day; children who had lost a parent or loved one … Read more
Note: This is a revised version of an earlier post. Last Wednesday, I was told that a woman on our regularly-scheduled trolley tour had an original deed to a Green-Wood lot with her, signed by Henry Pierrepont. Pierrepont was the primary mover behind the establishment of Green-Wood Cemetery in 1838, and was its longtime president. … Read more
It is always good, after an almost thirty-year-search, to find what you have been looking for for all of that time. And, when that search is for masterpieces by one of Green-Wood’s permanent residents, who was one of the giants of American art, the multi-faceted artist John La Farge (1835-1910), I sit up and take … Read more
Yesterday, I was going through a cache of documents from Green-Wood’s early history, including a handwritten certified copy of its charter by the State of New York on April 18, 1838, as a rural cemetery. Looking through those records, I came upon an envelope with this image on it: This is really quite an image–and … Read more
I’ve collected many things over the years: baseball cards, trains, decoys, cookie jars, and much more. In the 1980s, I went through a stoneware phase. Stoneware was the tupperware of the late 18th century and most of the 19th century: an all purpose storage container. It could hold liquids and solids. American stoneware is a … Read more