An Early Spring.

You don’t have to be a weatherman, or even a cemetery historian, to know that winter 2011-2012 barely made an appearance, and that spring it up and blooming. Looking at photographs I took last year, it seems to me that we are about 10 days earlier with blooms this year than last. I took these … Read more

Honoring Whom?

On Saturday, students from Shimoda, Japan, visited New York City. A must-see of their tour of the Big Apple: Townsend Harris’s Green-Wood grave. They were joined by students and a teacher from Townsend Harris High School in Queens. So what is that all about? Why would anyone travel halfway around the world to New York … Read more

Remembering Dodie.

On December 16, 2010, The Green-Wood Historic Fund dedicated a granite and bronze monument to the memory of those who had died when two airplanes collided over Staten Island fifty years earlier. For an account of that dedication, click here. It was quite a moving day; children who had lost a parent or loved one … Read more

Green-Wood Faces–And Mysteries

Note: This is a revised version of an earlier post. Last Wednesday, I was told that a woman on our regularly-scheduled trolley tour had an original deed to a Green-Wood lot with her, signed by Henry Pierrepont. Pierrepont was the primary mover behind the establishment of Green-Wood Cemetery in 1838, and was its longtime president. … Read more

What Was Lost Is Now Found

It is always good, after an almost thirty-year-search, to find what you have been looking for for all of that time. And, when that search is for masterpieces by one of Green-Wood’s permanent residents, who was one of the giants of American art, the multi-faceted artist John La Farge (1835-1910), I sit up and take … Read more