istence, Green-Wood Cemetery, with its 478 acres of rolling hills, marble monuments and lush landscaping, became a popular escape from the already crowding city. By 1860, more than 500,000 people were visiting the cemetery every year, at a time when the combined population of Brooklyn and Manhattan was just over 1,000,000. In fact, only the majesty of Niagara Falls drew more New York tourists than the cemetery next door.
In order to maintain its reputation as the final resting place of New York’s finest citizens, organizers forbid the burial of anyone who had died in jail or been executed for a crime. Despite this provision, a number of unsavory characters managed to make their way past the cemetery gates, including mobster Albert Anastasia, notorious Bowery Boys gang leader William “Bill the Butcher” Poole and William “Boss” Tweed, the legendary leader of New York’s corrupt Tammany Hall political machine. The cemetery also has an unusual group of living residents: Hundreds of monk parakeets, believed to have escaped or been released into the wild in the 1960s, now call the area home. In fact, the flock has become so well known that nearby Brooklyn College has adopted them as the school’s mascot.
Today, 175 years after it was founded, Green-Wood remains a fully operational cemetery, with nearly 600,000 permanent residents. It also remains a huge tourist draw, attracting more than 200,000 visitors every year. While some people still come, as the earliest did, for a brief respite from the crowded city, others come to visit the graves of some of New York’s greatest. Among the most popular resting places are those of composer and conductor Leonard Bernstein and artist Jean-Michel Basquiat. Baseball fans can pay their respects to more than 200 players and executives from the game’s early years, including Brooklyn Dodgers owner Charles Ebbets. Many visitors are also drawn to one of the cemetery’s most unusual features—the more than two dozen above-ground catacombs built into the side of a hill and designed to calm the Victorian-era fear of being buried alive. Among those buried there is Ward McAllister, the social arbiter who, alongside Caroline Astor, helped define New York’s Gilded Age society with his exclusive list of the city’s “400” elite—many of whom would join him in the hereafter in Brooklyn.