Green-Wood's Famous Residents
Everybody loves a great story, and Brooklyn's Green-Wood Cemetery has many of New York's great stories to tell. Everyone who was anybody in 19th-century New York wanted to be buried there, and they were. As The New York Times succinctly put it it 1866, "It is the ambition of the New Yorker to live upon Fifth Avenue, to take his airings in the [Central] Park, and to sleep with his fathers in Green-Wood."
The famous and infamous have continued to come to Green-Wood for over a century and a half now, bringing their lively stories and dark secrets with them. Green-Wood has more than 560,000 permanent residents, including Leonard Bernstein, Boss Tweed, Charles Ebbets, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Louis Comfort Tiffany, Horace Greeley, Civil War generals,... More >
Green-Wood's Famous Residents
Horace Greeley (1811-1872)
Horace Greeley, the founder and editor of the New York Tribune, was born in New Hampshire and apprenticed to a printer. When his master closed his business in 1831, Greeley set off, with $25 and his possessions in a......More >
Green-Wood's Famous Residents
Rev. Henry Ward Beecher (1813-1887)
In 1847, the Rev. Henry Ward Beecher became the pastor of Plymouth Church in Brooklyn Heights. Within a few years, his sermons, spreading the “Gospel of Love,” captivated the country. The Sunday morning......More >
Green-Wood's Famous Residents
Louis Moreau Gottschalk (1829-1869)
Louis Moreau Gottschalk was born in New Orleans to a German-Jewish father and a Creole mother who was an accomplished singer. At an early age he showed musical ability, and went off to Europe to study the piano. But......More >
Green-Wood's Famous Residents
Susan Smith McKinney-Steward (1846-1918)
Susan Smith McKinney-Steward was born in Weeksville, Brooklyn, and grew up on her father’s pig farm at the corner of Fulton Street and Buffalo Avenue. As a child, she studied with the leading organists in......More >
Green-Wood's Famous Residents
Leonard Bernstein (1918-1990)
Born in Massachusetts to Jewish immigrants from Russia, Leonard Bernstein resisted his father’s efforts to steer him into the family’s beauty-supply business, instead choosing a music career. After studying......More >