GREEN-WOOD CEMETERY
Geographic Setting
Spanning 478 acres across Brooklyn’s central ridge, Green-Wood Cemetery lies between the neighborhoods of Sunset Park, Windsor Terrace, and Borough Park, its undulating hills forming one of the borough’s grandest landscapes. The cemetery is bounded roughly by Fifth Avenue and Fort Hamilton Parkway to the west, McDonald Avenue to the east, 20th Street to the north, and 37th Street to the south. From its highest points—Battle Hill and Ocean Hill—one can see the Statue of Liberty, Lower Manhattan, and the harbor that shaped New York’s destiny. More than burial ground, Green-Wood is a monumental garden: an outdoor museum of stone and story, where art, nature, and memory coexist.
Etymology and Origins
The name “Green-Wood” was chosen in 1838 to evoke both pastoral tranquility and civic aspiration. Its founders—Brooklyn civic leaders Henry E. Pierrepont and Nehemiah Cleaveland—sought to create a rural cemetery modeled after Mount Auburn in Cambridge, Massachusetts, combining romantic landscape design with the moral uplift of nature. The hyphen in “Green-Wood,” preserved since its founding charter, reflects the original conception of the grounds as two symbolic realms: green for nature, wood for eternity.
Before its establishment, this land formed part of the Dutch township of New Utrecht and the colonial Gowanus farms. It was here, on Battle Hill, that American and British forces clashed during the Battle of Long Island in 1776—the first major engagement of the Revolutionary War. Soldiers’ bones still rest beneath its soil, mingling with those of later centuries.
The Neighborhood
19th Century: The Rural Cemetery Movement
When Green-Wood opened in 1838, Brooklyn was still a patchwork of villages. The concept of a landscaped burial ground outside the city was revolutionary. Urban graveyards were overcrowded and unsanitary; Green-Wood promised repose, beauty, and permanence. Its designer, David Bates Douglass, a West Point engineer and landscape theorist, shaped the terrain into rolling hills, meadows, ponds, and curving paths that followed the contours of nature rather than the rigidity of city grids.
The result was immediate acclaim. Within decades, Green-Wood became a national model—its success inspiring Central Park and Prospect Park. The cemetery’s monumental Gothic main gate, designed by Richard Upjohn in 1861 and carved from brownstone, became a civic icon.
By the Civil War era, Green-Wood had become both burial ground and pleasure ground. Families picnicked among the monuments; painters sketched its vistas; poets extolled its serenity. Guides advertised it as a “republic of the dead,” where rich and poor alike might rest under the same trees. Horse-drawn carriages wound through avenues named for virtues—Harmony, Serenity, and Fortitude—lining thousands of elaborately carved obelisks and angels.
Gilded Age: The City of Monuments
During the late 19th century, Green-Wood became the resting place of the nation’s elite. Industrialists, inventors, and artists commissioned mausoleums rivaling those of Europe. Among its most celebrated residents are Samuel Morse (inventor of the telegraph), Horace Greeley (editor of the New York Tribune), Henry Ward Beecher (abolitionist preacher), Jean-Michel Basquiat (artist), and Leonard Bernstein (composer).
Marble and granite memorials transformed the grounds into a sculpture garden of Victorian sentiment and American ambition. Charles Calverley’s “Angel of Resurrection” and John Frazee’s neoclassical tombs demonstrate the fusion of art and mourning that defined the period.
The cemetery’s horticultural design matured into an arboretum of more than 7,000 trees—oaks, beeches, and maples that blazed with autumn color. Ornamental lakes such as Sylvan Water and Valley Water mirrored the sky, turning Green-Wood into an Eden of repose high above the harbor’s din.
Early 20th Century: Civic Sanctuary
As Brooklyn urbanized, Green-Wood became its green lung. Streetcars and elevated trains brought weekend visitors who strolled its avenues as though in a public park. The cemetery hosted Memorial Day parades, choral concerts, and civic ceremonies honoring soldiers from every American war.
By mid-century, interment practices changed. The rise of cremation and suburban cemeteries slowed new burials, yet Green-Wood remained an active resting place. Its focus shifted toward preservation and interpretation. In 1966, it was designated a National Historic Landmark, ensuring protection for its monumental architecture and landscape.
Late 20th to 21st Century: Revival and Reverence
The 1980s and 1990s saw renewed attention to Green-Wood’s cultural importance. Historic preservationists documented its sculpture, genealogists traced family histories, and artists rediscovered its romantic vistas. In 1999, the nonprofit Green-Wood Historic Fund was established to oversee restoration, tours, and public programs.
Today, Green-Wood is both functioning cemetery and cultural institution. Its gates welcome thousands of visitors yearly for history walks, bird-watching, concerts, and art installations. It is home to colonies of monk parakeets that nest atop the Gothic gate, and to wildlife rare elsewhere in the city—red-tailed hawks, owls, and migratory songbirds.
Recent restoration efforts have revived the catacombs beneath Battle Hill and stabilized dozens of 19th-century monuments. The cemetery’s Modern Columbarium, completed in 2006, demonstrates how contemporary design can coexist within sacred historic ground.
Architecture and Atmosphere
Architecturally, Green-Wood is a city within a city—a panorama of American styles from Egyptian Revival to Art Deco. Mausoleums with Tiffany stained glass line winding avenues named for trees and virtues. The interplay of stone, water, and horizon creates a landscape of profound visual and emotional depth.
The atmosphere changes by season: lilacs in May, blazing foliage in October, snow-veiled statuary in winter. Silence is punctuated by bells from nearby churches and the distant echo of traffic along Fifth Avenue. Nowhere else in New York does time seem so layered—each grave a chapter, each vista a meditation on continuity.
Spirit and Legacy
Green-Wood endures as both memorial and metaphor for Brooklyn itself—diverse, grand, and resilient. It was built as a sanctuary for reflection, yet it has become a living archive of the city’s art, history, and humanity.
New York City
Use this custom Google map to explore where every neighborhood in all five boroughs of New York City is located.
The Five Boroughs
One of New York City’s unique qualities is its organization in to 5 boroughs: Manhattan, Brooklyn, Queens, The Bronx, and Staten Island. These boroughs are part pragmatic administrative districts, and part vestiges of the region’s past. Each borough is an entire county in New York State - in fact, Brooklyn is, officially, Kings County, while Staten Island is, officially Richmond County. But that’s not the whole story …
Initially, New York City was located on the southern tip of Manhattan (now the Financial District) that was once the Dutch colony of New Amsterdam. Across the East River, another city was rising: Brooklyn. In time, the city planners realized that unification between the rapidly rising cities would create commercial and industrial opportunities - through streamlined administration of the region.
So powerful was the pull of unification between New York and Brooklyn that three more counties were pulled into the unification: The Bronx, Queens, and Staten Island. And on January 1, 1898, the City of New York unified two cities and three counties into one Greater City of New York - containing the five boroughs we know today.
But because each borough developed differently and distinctly until unification, their neighborhoods likewise uniquely developed. Today, there are nearly 390 neighborhoods, each with their own histories, cultures, cuisines, and personalities - and each with residents who are fiercely proud of their corner of The Big Apple.
