Green-wood Cemetery

On June 30th, 2016 I cycled the Queens waterfront. The trip and destination I had in mind for that day was to cross the Pulaski Bridge to Greenpoint and visit and photograph the Old Calvary Cemetery. I was so enamored with the trip and photographic results that I decided right there to plan a trip to Green-Wood Cemetery, in Brooklyn ….in the Fall.
Green-Wood’s beauty is simply breathtaking. Founded in 1838 as one of America’s first “rural cemeteries”, It quickly developed a world wide reputation for it’s beauty and a fashionable place to be buried. People were dying to get into Green-Wood …after they died of course. :) Visitors in the nineteenth century would enjoy family outings and carriage rides. Green-Wood actually inspired the building of public parks like Central and Prospect and it’s 500,000 annual visitors, by 1860, rivaled Niagara Falls as the country’s greatest tourist attraction. Green-Wood is considered a “Cemetery Park”.
So today I visited Green-Woods almost 500 acres of awesome hills, ponds and paths in the middle of Brooklyn. Checking out the map, that I requested at the front gate, I was reminded of the maze in the movie “The Shining”. After awhile however I became so absorbed with the natural, arranged and sculpted beauty that I cared less about getting lost, even with the map. Grouped individual and family plots are designed with margins and a “white space” so that the Green-Wood landscape never looks crammed. There are 560,000 permanent residents …..Leonard Berstein, Boss Tweed, Charles Ebbets, Horace Greely and more ….Civil War generals, baseball legends, famous politicians, artists, entertainers and inventors.