Green-Wood Cemetery

The Sunday before Halloween I spent the afternoon with a few friends visiting the dead at Green-Wood Cemetery in Brooklyn. Those who know me are aware of my fondness for a good cemetery and this one did not disappoint. It was my first visit, and I was happy to find well-maintained grounds filled with beautiful 19th-century design. 

Founded in 1838, the 478–acre cemetery soon became a popular spot with tourists who picnicked there and prominent New Yorkers who chose it for their final resting place. New graves are added every year but the place retains its distinct Victorian feel.

A Gothic-styled main entrance greets you when you arrive as do the noisy monk parakeets who nest in the spires and make their presence known. Scattered throughout the grounds are various works of art from statues and memorials to intricately designed headstones and mausoleums.

 “Minerva and the Altar to Liberty”

The view from Battle Hill, the highest spot in Brooklyn.

The cemetery is filled with hills including Battle Hill, the highest point in Brooklyn and an important location during the Battle of Brooklyn, which was fought on August 27, 1776, and saw the Americans suffer a major defeat.

“Minerva and the Altar to Liberty” is a monument erected nearby to commemorate the event. With her arm raised as if in salute, she gazes across the city to her sister, Lady Liberty.

Everywhere you look you will find the rich and famous. Just on our outing we ran across Leonard Bernstein, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Boss Tweed, Lola Montez, Elias Howe, Laura Keene, and silent screen cowboy William S. Hart (look at his modest stone above).

Speaking of which, silent screen actress Florence La Badie was buried at Green-Wood in an unmarked grave in 1917. Fortunately, a recent campaign raised enough money for a proper headstone, which will be installed on the anniversary of her birthday, April 27, 2014 (more here).

The variety of headstones in the cemetery are staggering. I was especially drawn to the ones bearing statues, mainly women, often angels. They were all lovely in their own unique way from intricate details to gentle rounded edges from years of being pummelled by the elements. The most poignant ones were for the graves of children, which often included accounts of how they had passed.

We were only able to see a section of the grounds but plan to return another day for more exploring. Hopefully, it won't have to wait until next Halloween. 

For more information, visit here. Photos by Michele.

Sleepy Hollow

On a recent Sunday morning a friend and I met at Grand Central Station to take an early train up to Sleepy Hollow. What better place to visit in New York at this time of year?

Grand Central Station on a Sunday morning.

A view of the colourful Palisades from the train.

Immortalized by Washington Irving in The Legend of Sleepy Hollow, this village on the Hudson River was originally called North Tarrytown. It wasn’t until 1996 that it officially adopted the name it was better known as—Sleepy Hollow. It's small and charming and yes, there are signs of Ichabod Crane and the Headless Horseman all around.

Philipsburg Manor House

We started off at Philipsburg Manor, a historical site that was once home to the Philipse family, one of the largest slave-holders in the Colonial North and staunch supporters of the crown. During the Revolutionary War, British Army General Sir. Henry Clinton was headquartered at the Manor where he issued the Philipsburg Proclamation, proclaiming all slaves owned by Patriots freed. After the war, the Philipses' land was confiscated and sold off into parcels. 

We soon turned our attention to all things Irving. After crossing the spot where the Headless Horseman Bridge once stood, we visited the Old Dutch Church of Sleepy Hollow whose groundbreaking occurred in 1685. It makes an appearance in the legendary story as does its small burial ground where the Headless Horseman is supposedly buried. At night, as the story goes, his ghost “rides forth to the scene of battle in nightly quest of his head.” The grounds are filled with the graves of the village’s early Dutch residents, many of whose names were inspiration no doubt for Irving.

"Don't blink."

A Celtic cross marks the grave of Andrew Carnegie.

Next door is the quite large Sleepy Hollow Cemetery where generations of famous New Yorkers are buried including Andrew Carnegie, Brooke Astor, Harry and Leona Helmsley, Walter Chrysler, and Washington Irving (naturally). There is even the grave of Dan Draper (oh, so close), the founder of the New York Meteorological Observatory in Central Park. The cemetery is huge (90 acres) so we did not see all of it but it is very pretty with one side dropping down to the Pocantico River. The cemetery is filled with a mix of simple headstones, statues, and mausoleums. One ring of angels immediately brought to mind the "Blink" episode from Dr. Who and gave me a chill.

Broken heart at Coffee Labs Roasters

Afterwards, we headed over to Tarrytown for lunch where we enjoyed the largest Greek salads I’ve ever seen at Lefteris Gyro and walked around, peeking into some of the antique shops and checking out the Music Hall. We stopped in at Coffee Labs Roasters for coffee and a sweet before heading back to the train and Manhattan. It was a nice break from the city and a great way to get into the Halloween mood (even if the weather was a bit too nice; a bit of fog would have suited nicely).

And if any of you are wondering, I have been watching the new Fox series Sleepy Hollow. It’s become my new guilty pleasure show (along with Scandal). It’s all over the place (a recent episode involved the Lost Colony of Roanoke, which was is in Virginia but okay) yet it's a lot of fun.

Photos by Michele.

New York Marble Cemetery

Hidden away in the busy East Village is what appears at first to be a large garden or private park. But a closer inspection of the surrounding stonewalls reveal marble plaques bearing familiar names: Auchincloss, Ogilvie, Scribner, Comstock, Olmsted. These are just some of the roughly 2,100 people who call the New York Marble Cemetery their final home.

Founded in 1830, the cemetery was popular with prominent 19th-century families, so much so that shortly after developer Perkins Nichols built the New York City Marble Cemetery, which I visited a few years ago (read more here), down the street.

Instead of graves with tombstones, the bodies lie in their caskets ten feet below in a series of marble vaults (156 in total) that can be accessed via hidden access shafts. The plaques seen above indicate the exact location of each family’s vault. Sadly, more than half of those first interred in them in the early days of the cemetery were children, a grim reminder of the high morality rates of the time. Today, descendants of the original vault owners may use them if they wish although the last person to rest here was Charles Janeway VanZandt in 1937.

While there may be no sculptures or memorials to the dead, the cemetery is filled with flowers and trees as well as benches on which to rest, reflect, and enjoy a tiny bit of quiet while surrounded by  in the middle of a bustling city.

The New York Marble Cemetery is not open to the public on a regular basis. I was fortunate to visit on a day that it was during Open House New York. For more information, visit here.

And speaking of cemeteries, readers of this blog are familiar with my fondness for visiting the dead. Some of the other cemeteries I’ve posted about are Woodlawn Cemetery (here), Trinity Church Cemetery (here and here), the Third Cemetery of the Spanish and Portuguese Synagogue (here), the Granary Burial Ground in Boston (here), and the San Francisco National Cemetery at the Presidio (here). All Photos by Michele.

Visiting Ollie

Olive Thomas circa 1915.

On September 29, 1920 the funeral of silent screen star Olive Thomas was held at St. Thomas Episcopal Church on Fifth Avenue in New York where hundreds of mourners crowded the church and street. The young actress had died on September 10, 1920 in Paris after accidentally ingesting poison and the news of her passing filled the newspapers. Last month, on the anniversary of the funeral, my friend Allison and I, after a quick stop at St. Thomas, travelled out to Woodlawn Cemetery in the Bronx to pay our respect to our darling Ollie.

Photos by Michele.

I had been to out to Woodlawn to see Ollie’s final resting place a few years before on the anniversary of her birthday (read about that visit here) but my friend, who lives in LA, had never been so it made the visit even more special.

After a bit of a hunt for her mausoleum we found it, looking as tiny and downtrodden as I remembered, adorned with the single word Pickford (the mausoleum was built for two but Ollie remains alone as her husband, Jack Pickford, was buried with the rest of the Pickford clan in California). Hanging from the door was a single dried rose and a glow-stick (left over from a Halloween tour last year, we later found out). We both brought flowers for Ollie and just coincidentally chose pink and white (great minds); I had looked in vain for lilac-coloured flowers but no luck (Ollie's coffin had been covered with purple orchids). After the requisite photo taking (including having our driver take some photos of us), we sat on the step of the mausoleum and talked about Ollie and Jack before being surprised by the arrival of a tour group, which turned into an Annie Hall moment with us correcting the guide. Still, a wonderful day spent with lovely company.

For more about Ollie and why I'm such a fan, read my prior post here.

Trinity in the Rain

As some of you know, I'm quite fond of cemeteries and like taking photos of them. And so when I found myself down on Wall Street the other day with some time to kill before an appointment, I decided to pop over to the Trinity Church Cemetery and take some photos with my phone.

I've featured Trinity on this blog before but thought I'd show you what it looks like after it rains. The greens of the place appear more lush with a drenching and the remaining flowers' colours pop while the tombstones and monuments, some dating back to the 1700s, seem more prominent when set against a grey sky (the addition of fog would have been even better). 

One of the great things about visiting a cemetery is even if you've seen it before there's always something new to discover. This time round I stumbled upon the tombstone of one Archbald Leitch. I was immediately reminded of the Cary Grant film Arsenic and Old Lace in which one of the tombstones in the cemetery next to his old aunts' home says Archibald Leach, Grant's real name.

The cemetery was filled with loads of birds, some grabbing up worms from the wet ground while others, like this pigeon, were drying off their feathers. With the church bells ringing, I left the cemetery and ran off to my appointment.

Photos by Michele.