EXTRA! EXTRA! The Green-Wood Cemetery Issue
There is so much happening at this beautiful place, it needed its own edition.
There is no dedicated news coverage of Sunset Park — but Sunset Park makes news. This FREE weekly(ish) digest curates all the headlines from all the sources that touch our neighborhood, which is one of the most vibrant in Brooklyn.
There is so much happening at this beautiful place, it needed its own edition
Why Green-Wood Cemetery matters
Green-Wood Cemetery, and why I choose cremation
Dance among the graves in ‘Nightfall: Danse Macabre’
Green-Wood Cemetery to come alive with Day of the Dead art installation
What to do in queer NYC: Gay graves
The Green-Wood Cemetery welcomes new board members
In New York City, the odds of spotting a rare bird are rising
In the big city, wildlife researchers are on the prowl
I tried the viral gravestone cookies and they really are to die for
11 unique headstone inscriptions
Exploring Green-Wood Cemetery's haunting history
The odd joys of ‘tombstone tourism’
The English sparrows of Green-Wood
When was Eunice Newton Foote’s funeral?
Why Green-Wood Cemetery matters
By WNYC’s ALL OF IT podcast: Founded in 1838 and now a National Historic Landmark, Green-Wood Cemetery in Sunset Park was one of the first rural cemeteries in America. By the early 1860s, it was attracting 500,000 visitors a year, second only to Niagara Falls as the nation’s greatest tourist attraction. We talk about its historical significance, and present importance, with photographer and writer Andrew Garn, author of Brooklyn Arcadia: Art, History, and Nature at Majestic Green-Wood. Also joining us is Allison C. Meier, a writer who also leads tours of cemeteries, including Green-Wood. Her latest book is called Grave. … LISTEN TO PODCAST
Green-Wood Cemetery, and why I choose cremation
By WEE KEK KOON in the SOUTH CHINA MORNING POST: One of the more interesting things we did during our visit to New York was going to a storytelling event at the Green-Wood Cemetery in Sunset Park. It was organized by The Moth, a New York-based non-profit group dedicated to the art of storytelling. While I would very much like to meet or see a ghost, I was made to do an online check to make sure that the seventh month of the traditional Chinese calendar, when hungry ghosts are released from the other world to roam this one, was well and truly over. Thus assured, we made our way to the cemetery in the bracing evening breeze, fortified by the piña coladas that we just had with our delicious Puerto Rican dinner. The 193-hectare (477-acre) Green-Wood Cemetery is a National Historic Landmark. It is not as famous as the Père Lachaise Cemetery in Paris where composer Frédéric Chopin, writer Oscar Wilde and singer Édith Piaf are buried, but Green-Wood boasts memorials to a number of notable people. Among these are the artist Jean-Michel Basquiat, music conductor Leonard Bernstein, and William Colgate and Charles Pfizer, pioneers of industry and commerce who gave their names to products still found in the bathrooms and medicine cabinets of many homes. … READ MORE
Dance among the graves in ‘Nightfall: Danse Macabre’
By BROOKLYN PAPER: “The undeniable truth is, we are all going to die. So why not embrace the inevitable and go dancing to our graves?” reads the invitation to “Nightfall: Danse Macabre,” Green-Wood Cemetery’s crowning event of the fall. “Danse Macabre,” or dance of death, is a celebration made up of music, moving images, performances and entertainment all around the graveyard on Oct. 19, and 20, from 7 p.m. – 10 p.m. … “The ambiance of the Cemetery on fall nights creates the perfect environment for artistic expression, celebration, and reflection,” said Harry J. Weil, Green-Wood’s director of public programs and special projects in a statement.”It’s a poignant reminder that the same destiny awaits us all. Until that fateful day, Green-Wood visitors can shake off any fears or anxieties at this celebration of the time we have left together.” … READ MORE
Green-Wood Cemetery to come alive with Day of the Dead art installation
By BK READER: The Green-Wood Cemetery in Sunset Park is showcasing a new Day of the Dead-inspired art installation. Titled Mictlán, the installation was created by Cinthya Santos-Briones, a Brooklyn artist that utilized ancient and modern conceptions of death in Mexico to put together her work of art. As a former anthropologist and ethnohistorian, Santos-Briones is an artist who reflects histories, rituals, and customs through her work. With Mictlán, Santos-Briones drew inspiration from her family’s Día de los Muertos celebrations in Tulancingo, Mexico, along with numerous families she visited while working in the field. “Mictlán references the conception of death in Mesoamerican thought—life-death duality. I created this work through extensive research, revisiting the iconography of death through pre-Hispanic and colonial texts,” said Santos-Briones. … READ MORE
What to do in queer NYC
By GAY CITY NEWS: Look ahead to events coming up in queer NYC Oct. 19-23 … READ MORE
GAY GRAVES
When: Saturday, October 21, 1 p.m.
Where: Green-Wood Cemetery, 755 Fifth Avenue, Brooklyn, NY (meet at the Inset Gothic Archway)
Get in the spirit of Halloween with a visit to Green-Wood and learn about the cemetery’s queer luminaries – including artist Jean-Michel Basquiat and lyricist Fred Ebb. Tickets via Eventbrite.
The Green-Wood Cemetery welcomes new board members
By PATCH: The Green-Wood Cemetery in Sunset Park is welcoming Nathalie Pierrepont Danilovich, Catherine Feldman, Michelle Nasir, Elyse Newman, and John T. Reddick to its Board of Trustees. The five bring a wealth of experience and insight that will contribute significantly to the Cemetery's continued success. … READ MORE
In New York City, the odds of spotting a rare bird are rising
By THE NEW YORK TIMES: Sharp-eyed birders might spot brown boobies, a tropical species once rare even in the Southern states. A flock of Canada geese might just include a pink-footed goose, too. … The white ibis, a coastal marsh bird, is common in Florida, Texas and South America. It has been gradually expanding northward. … "It's sort of exciting because it's this bird that didn't really regularly reach the New York area previously, and now people have a decent chance of finding them if they go out to salt marshes in — basically right now — August and September," said Marshall Iliff, the project leader for the Cornell Lab of Ornithology's eBird project. At least two have been seen in recent years in Brooklyn: One was spotted last year in Calvert Vaux Park, and one was spotted in 2015 flying over Sunset Park’s Green-Wood Cemetery and Prospect Park. … READ MORE
In the big city, wildlife researchers are on the prowl
By THE NEW YORK TIMES: Early one morning last month, Laura Dudley Plimpton found herself in Forest Park, in Queens, staring at two captured raccoons. … This trap contained two fully grown, rotund adults, two balls of bristly fur that had merged into what one member of the trapping team called a single “big squish.” The raccoons seemed to be unbothered, one resting casually atop the other inside the cage, which had jumbo marshmallows as bait. “You guys are so silly,” Plimpton said. … Although rats receive most of the attention, New York City is crawling with all kinds of creatures — raccoons, skunks, opossums, deer and even the occasional coyote — that are not always visible to people. For these animals, urban living provides some clear opportunities, especially “if they learn to utilize human resources such as trash,” said Maria Diuk-Wasser, who leads Columbia’s eco-epidemiology lab, where Plimpton is a doctoral student. … Last summer, Plimpton was trapping and swabbing raccoons in Sunset Park’s sprawling Green-Wood Cemetery when she began noticing animals with strange symptoms: hair loss, scabbed paws, vision problems and disorientation. It was an outbreak of canine distemper, a disease that researchers had not been looking for at first. “It just happened in front of our eyes,” Diuk-Wasser said. … READ MORE
I tried the viral gravestone cookies and they really are to die for
By TERRI PETERS for ALLRECIPES: When a loved one passes away, there are often lots of sweet food-related memories left behind. From grandma’s mouth-watering banana bread to Dad's World Famous Lasagna, families build memories on the meals that have been prepared for them by the people they cherish most. TikToker Rosie Grant has taken left-behind food memories a step further. On her @ghostlyarchive account, she’s gone viral for finding recipes left on gravestones of the deceased and making those foods, sometimes even traveling to the grave itself to deliver her version of the recipe in person. One of the first recipes to get Grant’s unique hobby recognized was for spritz cookies. The recipe appears on the gravestone of Naomi Odessa Miller-Dawson, who rests at Green-Wood Cemetery in Sunset Park. According to Medium, Dawson was a mother and postal worker who loved to bake in her free time. Her spritz cookie recipe was famous among her family and friends, and she made them with a hand-operated cookie press from the 1950s. The cookies are essentially a vanilla butter cookie recipe, very similar to sugar cookies. Unlike sugar cookies, spritz cookies are usually piped onto a cookie sheet through a cookie press and baked in shapes like stars and Christmas trees. Similar to a shortbread, spritz cookies usually include lots of butter and ingredients like flour and an egg. … READ MORE
11 unique headstone inscriptions
By MENTAL FLOSS: … Many people leave behind family recipes when they pass, but few of them have those recipes etched into their headstones. Naomi Odessa Miller-Dawson’s grave at Green-Wood Cemetery in Sunset Park features a stone “recipe book” listing the ingredients of her signature spritz cookies; anyone who visits the site can then recreate the cookies at home. Digital librarian Rosie Grant tests recipes she collects from headstones around the country, and she helped make Miller-Dawson’s headstone famous in 2022 when she chose it to kick off the project. … READ MORE
Exploring Green-Wood's haunting history
YOUTUBE: Are you ready to embark on a journey into the realm of the departed? Tonight, we step into one of the United States' most prominent graveyards, a place steeped in riveting history and chilling tales of the supernatural. Restless spirits, poltergeist activity, and age-old legends await. Join me as we unveil the secrets of the infamous Green-Wood Cemetery. … WATCH VIDEO
The odd joys of ‘tombstone tourism’
By NEXT AVENUE: … A tombstone tourist, also known as a taphophile, is someone who is fascinated by everything cemetery — gravesites, obelisks, allegorical sculptures and crypts. … In Green-Wood Cemetery in Sunset Park, you can hear the chatter and squawks of monk parakeets, also known as Quaker parrots, which live in the gothic spires at the ornate main gate, and observe the more than 185 species of migrating birds that stop and visit there each year. You can participate in a "Meet the Bees" tour, led by a certified master beekeeper, where apiary enthusiasts learn about the cemetery's bee colony and can actually hold an active comb full of honeybees. … READ MORE
The English sparrows of Green-Wood
By CECIL WHIG: In 1851, Nicholas Pike of the Brooklyn Institute in New York imported and released approximately 50 English Sparrows near Green-Wood Cemetery in Sunset Park to try and control a serious canker-worm (Geometridae) infestation that threatened New York City's trees. Nicholas' theory caught on and cities all over the United States started importing and releasing the birds in North America. In 1869 it was reported that the city of Philadelphia released 1000 English Sparrows. … READ MORE
When was Eunice Newton Foote’s funeral?
By GH GOSSIP: Eunice Newton Foote was an influential American scientist, inventor, as well as advocate for women's rights. She is renowned for being the first scientist to recognize that certain gasses, when exposed to sunlight, have the ability to warm the atmosphere. Foote's groundbreaking research predicted the impact of rising carbon dioxide (CO2) levels on climate, which is now known as the Greenhouse effect. … The date of her funeral is not publicly known, however, her burial took place at Green-Wood Cemetery in Sunset Park. … READ MORE
This is such a beautiful cemetery....I love how they draw the community in with so many cool events to experience the peace and natural beauty that lives within such a vibrant part of Brooklyn. It's truly a treasure!