Welcome to Green-Wood Discovery!

Welcome to the Green-wood Discovery blog. My name is Jeff Richman and I am the historian at Green-Wood Cemetery in Brooklyn, New York. Green-Wood is truly a remarkable place: 478 acres of trees, sculpture, ponds, gardens, and grass-covered hills in the heart of urban Brooklyn. It is my privilege to be the historian at Green-Wood … Read more

Green-Wood Connections Everywhere: Philadelphia

More from the “if I travel, I can usually find something pertaining to Green-Wood Cemetery” files. On a recent visit to Philadelphia, we headed off towards the Rodin Museum. As I drove, my friend navigated, with a map on her lap. As we arrived near the museum, she asked me, “Who was Henry George?” The … Read more

A Great Gravestone, Resurrected

Nathaniel Currier started his lithography printing company that would be become the famous firm of Currier and Ives (both Currier and Ives are interred, of course, at Green-Wood Cemetery) in the 1830’s, printing letterheads, sheet music, and other routine business items. But, in 1835, Currier headed in a new direction: illustrated news. It was in … Read more

Angel of Music

Louis Moreau Gottschalk, America’s first matinee idol and its first internationally acclaimed classical composer/musician, is interred at Green-Wood Cemetery. Here’s Cecile Licad, in 2003, playing Gottschalk’s Manchega. Quite a performance, and on a Steinway piano (the Steinway family owns the largest tomb at Green-Wood, with room for 256 interments: 128 on the ground floor and … Read more

A Heroic Fireman Memorialized

I recently found myself at an Association for Gravestone Studies convention in Schenectady with a few hours of free time, and decided to head over to the New York State Museum in Albany for a visit. Headed in–quite an exhibition on September 11–video of a fireman who lost all of his fellows, a badly damaged … Read more