Since soon after Green-Wood Cemetery’s founding in 1838, it has been a great sculpture garden. If you lived in mid-19th-century New York City or Brooklyn, and you wanted to see sculpture, you came to Green-Wood. There was virtually no other public sculpture at that time. The Metropolitan and Brooklyn Museums did not yet exist. No … Read more
This past Saturday the General Meade Society of Philadelphia (“Preserving the Memory of the Victor of Gettysburg”) ventured up to Green-Wood for a Civil War tour. Here’s their website. And here’s the group: During the tour, I talked about Green-Wood’s Civil War Project, now in its 10th year. Since its inception, hundreds of volunteers have … Read more
I’ve been catching up on some e-mail this week and came across a link Ruth Edebohls (one of our great Historic Fund tour guides and a great fan of New York history) sent me to a Daily News story from January, 2012. It reports that a marker was unveiled in front of the home of Abigail … Read more
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