Green-Wood Cemetery’s Living Dead

New York City was gridded for life, not death, and by the late eighteen-twenties there was no good place to put all the bodies. Burial grounds were brimming. New Yorkers walked around holding vinegar-soaked handkerchiefs to their faces, believing that “putrid miasmas” emanated from graveyards and killed people. Scientists were only starting to piece together that contaminated water, not flawed character, caused cholera; that smallpox probably originated in rodents; and that yellow fever was the vector work of the lowly mosquito, not the result of immigration or rotting vegetables. A case of yellow fever, a disease that inspired what one doctor called “great terror,” often started with a headache, followed by a high temperature, a slow heart rate, delirium, a sallow complexion, and bleeding from the eyes, nose, and gums. A telltale sign of imminent demise was “ropy mucous coffee-ground black vomit.” Sweet death: no relief. “The increment of the city” was overtaking one graveyard after another and exposing the dead to “violation in the opening of streets, and other city improvements,” David Bates Douglass, a prominent surveyor and civil engineer, wrote. Finding a solution was a matter of “great and urgent solicitude.”

New Haven, Connecticut, had “reformed” its graveyard—by creating a new one at the edge of town. Other places picked up on the idea of “rural” cemeteries. In Paris, Père Lachaise Cemetery, modelled on an English garden, opened in what is now the Twentieth Arrondissement, and Boston, inspired by Lachaise, created Mt. Auburn Cemetery in Cambridge. Henry Evelyn Pierrepont, a wealthy developer and urban planner, wanted something similar for New York. Douglass, who was scouting locations for him, knew of some “hills back of Brooklyn.”

The site stood “at the distance of two and a half miles from the South Ferry,” Douglass wrote in a report. He described the landscape as “beautifully diversified with hill and valley—descending in some places to less than twenty feet above tide-water, and in others, rising to more than two hundred,” with a “variety and beauty of picturesque scenery” rarely found in “so small a compass.” The terrain lent itself to “a high degree of adaptation, as a place of sepulture either in tombs or in graves.”

Geologically, Douglass was describing a push moraine: about twenty thousand years ago, the front edge of a glacier advanced and retreated, over and over, rumpling the earth like a thin rug badly vacuumed. The result was a tumble of hills and knolls, tiered cliffs, kettle depressions created by massive blocks of stranded ice—these later became ponds—and a vast outwash plain. Part of the Battle of Long Island, an unsuccessful but pivotal moment in the Revolutionary War, had been fought there, at the highest point in Brooklyn, in late August of 1776. Pierrepont bought a hundred and seventy-eight acres.

What to call it? Necropolis? Too cold. “A Necropolis is a mere depository for dead bodies,” Douglass wrote. “Green-Wood,” on the other hand, implied “verdure, shade, ruralness, natural beauty, every thing, in short, in contrast with the glare, set form, fixed rule and fashion of the city.” And so it was chartered, on April 18, 1838: the Green-Wood Cemetery.

Douglass laid out the first of what would become fifty-nine avenues, a hundred and eighty footpaths, and four walks. One could spend eternity, or an afternoon, on Sassafras, Snowberry, Jasmine, Lavender, Mistletoe, Linden, or Vine. The avenues formed a carriage route called the Tour. “Now you pass over verdant and sunny lawns, now through park-like groves, and now by the side of a tangled, unpruned forest,” Nehemiah Cleaveland, Green-Wood’s first historian, wrote. There were panoramic views of Gowanus Bay and lower Manhattan. The Evening Post reported that Green-Wood, whose design later influenced the creation of Central Park, was “almost too beautiful a spot to be given up to the dead.”

The cemetery expanded to four hundred and seventy-eight acres, and will grow no more. Green-Wood, one of the largest privately owned properties in New York City, is now fully surrounded—by delis, apartment buildings, town houses, a car wash, Philip Kaplan Glass & Mirror, M & S Batrouni Service Station, Long & DeLosa Construction Group, an M.T.A. train yard, Fort Hamilton Tires & Rims, Life Storage, Auto Dent Collision, Padrino Auto Repair, Stanley Steemer, Shannon Florist & Greenhouse, and Baked in Brooklyn, which is an actual bakery, not a cannabis dispensary. A real-estate agent might refer to the neighborhood as Greenwood Heights, but Green-Wood’s president of the past thirty-nine years, Rich Moylan—a self-described “Brooklyn boy, Fourteenth Street between Third and Fourth Avenue”—says it’s also called “South South” Park Slope. The cemetery’s current footprint was largely in place by 1895, as were a great many of the nearly six hundred thousand people now interred there, collectively known to Green-Wood’s staff as “permanent residents.” Its main entrance, at Twenty-fifth Street and Fifth Avenue, is marked by an imposing brownstone Gothic Revival structure, the Arch, where a pandemonium of monk parakeets has long kept an elaborate nest.

Green-Wood’s earliest burial lots, typically fourteen by twenty-seven feet, cost a hundred dollars apiece; today, a grave starts at twenty-one thousand. The names of the dead are recorded in enormous archival ledgers bound in cloth or leather, the oldest of whose bindings have deteriorated into “red rot,” a substance with the consistency of suède. The inaugural name, Mrs. Sarah Hanna, was entered on September 5, 1840, in the kind of cursive handwriting that humans have lost the ability and patience to parse. Hanna and several others had been dug up from New York Marble Cemetery, in the East Village, and moved to Green-Wood, followed by people named Westcoat, White, Clark, Wilson, Lewis, Codman, and Blount. In came “Otto Van Kyle’s Infant,” “George Bristow’s Infant,” “Oakley’s Infant.” Causes of death: apoplexy, dropsy, smallpox, consumption.

Douglass predicted that Green-Wood would hold a collection of “monuments commemorative of the distinguished characters and events of national history.” But although tens of thousands of visitors were coming for respite, too few were buying: only a hundred and seventy-five people were interred there by 1843. Père Lachaise had had a similar problem until its operators, in a macabre bit of marketing, arranged for the remains of Molière and Jean de La Fontaine to be relocated to their grounds.

Who could Green-Wood get? America was only sixty-seven years old. Pierrepont and company landed on a New York governor, DeWitt Clinton, who had pushed for the construction of the Erie Canal, the first shipping route between the country’s interior and the Atlantic Ocean. Clinton was ridiculed for his obsession with infrastructure until the numbers proved him out: the canal transformed New York City into an economic powerhouse, and its population surged to more than two hundred thousand.

Clinton, who died suddenly, and in office, in 1828, lay in a borrowed vault in Albany, having left his family too destitute to send his body back to New York City, where he’d served multiple terms as mayor. Green-Wood offered a permanent home and a bronze “hero” statue, and the Governor was carted south. Green-Wood interred him at what is now called Clinton Dell, and, in 1853, erected the statue, by Henry Kirke Brown. It stands ten and a half feet tall on an eight-and-a-half-foot pedestal, and shows Clinton wearing both a business suit and a toga. Green-Wood had less trouble attracting clients after that: Tiffanys, Pfizers, Henry Ward Beecher, James Gordon Bennett, Sr., Horace Greeley. Monument carvers and florists set up shop in the neighborhood.

A hundred and eighty-seven years after its founding, Green-Wood resembles a sculpture garden. There are more than two hundred and fifty thousand monuments and more than five hundred mausolea. Owls, horses, baseballs, clasped hands, winged hourglasses, and empty beds are among the iconography that I have seen incised on the funerary surfaces. The angels (and they are many) weep and sag, but they also look heavenward. Lambs mean children. Broken flower stems and shorn columns symbolize early death. There are sarcophagi and plinths and cenotaphs. Lord at the obelisks. One day this spring, I asked Moylan to show me his favorite monument. It is shaped very clearly like a—“I’ll just say ‘a marital aid,’ ” one staffer later told me. Moylan said, “We don’t know how it got past the censors.”

Topography is destiny: dozens of mausolea were tucked into those deglaciated cliffs, and during grassier seasons they resemble thatched-roof hobbit houses with bronze or stone doors. Other mausolea are freestanding. Some have Tiffany stained-glass windows. The tomb of Charles Feltman, a restaurateur who supposedly invented the hot dog, is nicer than my apartment. There are four front steps bracketed by two huge urns, half a dozen Corinthian columns, and six life-size maidens, possible goddesses. Atop a cupola, the archangel Michael stands seven feet tall, his sword lowered, facing a Burger King. Feltman’s eternal neighbors include the Sommers, the Lynans, the Archers, and the Gales. The Maniscalcos might like to know that their guardian angel has come to miss her marble arms.

One Saturday afternoon in March, two dozen tourists representing a near-complete range of the human life span climbed aboard a trolley at Green-Wood and submitted to the effervescence of Marge Raymond, a seasoned singer with a blond updo and sunglasses the size of T-bones. She wore head-to-toe black and had on so much turquoise jewelry that I had to ask about it. “Turquoise is very protecting,” she told me. “Not that I believe in anything like that.” (She was raised Catholic, in Flatbush.) I sat beside Sylvia Fink, a retired physical therapist who considered tours at Green-Wood to be among life’s “enriching activities”—she’d been on the trolley before, but not Marge’s. As we pulled up to DeWitt Clinton’s towering bronze likeness, Marge said, “Quite the man!”

If Green-Wood employees hear a noteworthy name and know that person to be a permanent resident, they are likely to say, “We’ve got him.” And it is usually a “him,” though the cemetery also likes to let people know that Green-Wood’s got Laura Keene, an actress who witnessed Abraham Lincoln’s assassination at Ford’s Theatre; Dr. Susan Smith McKinney Steward, New York’s first Black female physician; and Teddy Roosevelt’s mother, as well as his wife, who died hours apart on Valentine’s Day, 1884. After marking his diary “X” and writing, “The light has gone out of my life,” Roosevelt had the women placed in a vault accessible by a hatch in the earth. Across Green-Wood, stone slabs—vault covers—lie flat on the ground, often affixed with patinaed rings, for hoisting. Some clients instructed the cemetery to seal their tombs by letting the entrances grow over. You could be standing on top of a door and never know it. Certain vaults can be opened only with earth-moving machines and an iron key as long as a human forearm.

Green-Wood doesn’t have Teddy (he’s in Oyster Bay), but it’s got James Weldon Johnson, co-author of “Lift Every Voice and Sing”; James Harper, publisher; F. A. O. Schwarz, toy seller; John Underwood, typewriter maven; Duncan Phyfe, furniture-maker. Jeff Richman, the cemetery’s historian, covers most of this in four books that he’s written about Green-Wood, all published by Green-Wood. In one of the cemetery’s maps, William (Boss) Tweed, a Green-Wooder since 1878, is indexed as “Tammany crook.” There is Eberhard Faber (“eraser on pencil”), Walter Hunt (“invented safety pin”), Samuel Chester Reid (“designed Amer. flag”). We won’t have time here for Isabella Stewart Gardner’s parents or Winston Churchill’s grandparents, or, at length, for John Matthews, the “soda fountain king,” one of whose descendants, Felicia Tracy, recently allowed me to tag along when she visited his monument with her daughter and granddaughter, as part of a genealogical pilgrimage from Northern California. Neela Wickremesinghe, Green-Wood’s chief conservator, told the women, “Whenever I hear ‘girls’ trip to New York,’ this is where I take people, too.”

Wickremesinghe, who is thirty-seven, trained in Columbia University’s historic-preservation program and runs an initiative for young people interested in the discipline. The Matthews monument often stars in her presentations. It consists of four pink-granite columns supporting a sculpture of Gothic arches and spires in brownstone and marble. Matthews lies in repose, gazing up at carved images of his life. Above that sits a figure that represents his wife, or Grief; either way, she’s missing her head. Gargoyles spout water when it rains. Tracy, a rancher and a former teacher, began to tell Wickremesinghe about a close friend of her parents’: “He was at Harvard, at the Fogg Museum—”

“We have the Foggs!” Wickremesinghe said.

Green-Wood is an active cemetery; the staff typically bury at least one new resident per day. Not allowed on the grounds: dogs, running, rollerblading, music, alcohol, scooters, bikes, kites, Frisbees, balls, skimpy clothing, sunbathing, swimming, shouting, skylarking, picnicking (“light lunches” excepted, and only at the ponds), or fashion modelling. Go to Prospect Park for all that.

A single grave may hold up to six people: three casketed, three cremated. Green-Wood stacks clients at depths of nine, seven, and five feet. Detailed burial orders describe who is interred. The cemetery relies on these records when investigating heirship, the legal passage of burial rights. “It goes first to children. No children? Spouse. No spouse? Parents. No parents? Brothers and sisters. No brothers and sisters? Nieces and nephews,” Sara Durkacs, the vice-president of lot-holder relations, told me. A grave at Green-Wood is the only real estate that some New Yorkers ever own. If a lot goes unused for seventy-five years, the cemetery can petition to reclaim it. Owners may sell a vacant lot back to Green-Wood. What they may not do—at least not without consent from all interested parties, or a court order—is rearrange the dead once they’re in the ground, or exhume them to make a sale. This isn’t Jenga.

You know that they’re about to dig a grave at Green-Wood when you see a large metal supply box containing, among other things, planks, plywood, and a mechanical casket-lowering device. One bitter Friday, Jahongir Usmanov, Green-Wood’s operations manager, who drives around in an F-150, parked near a supply box and led me up a gravel footpath called Autumn Walk, in a section named for the country estate of Samuel F. B. Morse, who invented the telegraph before becoming a Green-Wooder in 1872. It was nine-thirty in the morning and so windy that miniature flags on graves were horizontal. The gravediggers were preparing for a funeral at two. Four neon-orange stakes marked off a rectangle in front of a headstone. The stone was inscribed with the name of a woman buried at nine feet; her husband was coming in at seven.