Jeff Richman This has been a great year for our Green-Wood Historic Fund volunteers–our best yet. Volunteers staffed our new Historic Fund cart, welcoming visitors to historic Green-Wood Cemetery, answering their questions, and selling self-guided walking tours, books, and other items. Other volunteers worked on our Civil War Project, coming in once a month to search the … Read more
Welcome to the Green-wood Discovery blog. My name is Jeff Richman and I am the historian at Green-Wood Cemetery in Brooklyn, New York. Green-Wood is truly a remarkable place: 478 acres of trees, sculpture, ponds, gardens, and grass-covered hills in the heart of urban Brooklyn. It is my privilege to be the historian at Green-Wood … Read more
More from the “if I travel, I can usually find something pertaining to Green-Wood Cemetery” files. On a recent visit to Philadelphia, we headed off towards the Rodin Museum. As I drove, my friend navigated, with a map on her lap. As we arrived near the museum, she asked me, “Who was Henry George?” The … Read more
Early in 1839, Louis Daguerre offered his invention, the Daguerreotype, to the world. That invention was the birth of photography. Daguerre then dispatched his pupil, Francois Jean-Baptiste Gouraud, who was the agent for the manufacturer of equipment endorsed by Daguerre, to America to introduce photography. It was 170 years ago today that Gouraud arrived in … Read more
Nathaniel Currier started his lithography printing company that would be become the famous firm of Currier and Ives (both Currier and Ives are interred, of course, at Green-Wood Cemetery) in the 1830’s, printing letterheads, sheet music, and other routine business items. But, in 1835, Currier headed in a new direction: illustrated news. It was in … Read more
Louis Moreau Gottschalk, America’s first matinee idol and its first internationally acclaimed classical composer/musician, is interred at Green-Wood Cemetery. Here’s Cecile Licad, in 2003, playing Gottschalk’s Manchega. Quite a performance, and on a Steinway piano (the Steinway family owns the largest tomb at Green-Wood, with room for 256 interments: 128 on the ground floor and … Read more
I recently found myself at an Association for Gravestone Studies convention in Schenectady with a few hours of free time, and decided to head over to the New York State Museum in Albany for a visit. Headed in–quite an exhibition on September 11–video of a fireman who lost all of his fellows, a badly damaged … Read more
In 2008, PBS’s Channel 13 featured Green-Wood as part of their The City Concealed series. I had the pleasure of being their guide for the piece. It originally appeared in October 2008 and is also online at Channel 13’s website and Vimeo, listed below. I hope you enjoy it. The City Concealed: Tombs & Catacombs … Read more
Green-Wood’s 478 acres are home to 7000 trees. And, as you may have guessed, those trees produce millions and millions of leaves. For the last few years, it has been the practice at Green-Wood, in the fall, to mow most of those leaves in place as a mulch. But, because that has resulted in a … Read more
A new planting has just gone in on the hill off Oak Avenue, directly in the line of the gaze of the bronze Horace Greeley across the road. Approximately seventy victims of the attacks on the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001 are interred at Green-Wood Cemetery. Several of them, including three firemen from … Read more