Green-Wood Cemetery, Brooklyn
The park before the parks – Gothic gates, glacial hills, and the parakeets’ spires where 1850s New York picnicked among its dead.
At a glance
- Type
- Rural cemetery (National Historic Landmark)
- Period
- 1838
- Style
- Rural-romantic landscape; Gothic Revival gates
- Location
- Sunset Park, Brooklyn, New York, USA
- Coordinates
- 40.6531, -73.9903
- Gates
- Richard Upjohn, 1861 – monk parakeet colony resident
Overview
Green-Wood’s 478 acres of glacial kettle ponds and ridges drew half a million strollers yearly by the 1850s – the rural cemetery as proto-park whose popularity argued Central Park into being. Upjohn’s brownstone Gothic gates (their spires housing Brooklyn’s famous monk parakeets) open to Battle Hill’s Revolutionary ground – the borough’s highest point under Minerva’s salute toward Liberty.
History
Leonard Bernstein, Boss Tweed, Basquiat, and Tiffany (his glass in the chapel’s catacombs) headline 570,000 residents; the Battle of Brooklyn’s 1776 lines crossed the hills each August’s reenactment honours. Catacomb concerts and twilight tours renewed the Victorian habit – recreation among memory.
Architecture and Design
Pierrepont’s landscape curls paths по the moraine; mausolea by McKim and Upjohn rank the avenues. Minerva’s 1920 bronze waves to the harbor’s Statue – sightline preserved by deed.
Cultural significance
Green-Wood is the American park movement’s seedbed and Brooklyn’s open-air archive – the rural cemetery’s masterpiece still burying and performing.
Visiting today
Free daily; trolley tours and the app map notables. The parakeets’ dusk chorus at the gates closes visits properly.
Getting there
R train to 25th Street climbs a block to the gates.
Sources and resources
Find it on the map
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