Green-Wood Cemetery

Green-Wood Cemetery is a 478-acre (193 ha) cemetery in the western portion of Brooklyn, New York City. The cemetery is located between South Slope/Greenwood Heights, Park Slope, Windsor Terrace, Borough Park, Kensington, and Sunset Park, and lies several blocks southwest of Prospect Park. Its boundaries include, among other streets, 20th Street to the northeast, Fifth Avenue to the northwest, 36th and 37th Streets to the southwest, Fort Hamilton Parkway to the south, and McDonald Avenue to the east.

Green-Wood Cemetery was founded in 1838 as a rural cemetery, in a time of rapid urbanization when churchyards in New York City were becoming overcrowded. Described as "Brooklyn's first public park by default long before Prospect Park was created", Green-Wood Cemetery was so popular that it inspired a competition to design Central Park in Manhattan, as well as Prospect Park nearby.

The cemetery was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1997 and was made a National Historic Landmark in 2006. In addition, the 25th Street gates, the Weir Greenhouse, and the Fort Hamilton Parkway Gate & Green-Wood Cemetery Chapel were separately designated as city landmarks by the New York City Landmarks Preservation Commission at various times.

Green-Wood's site is characterized by varied topography created by glacial moraines, particularly the Harbor Hill Moraine. Battle Hill, also known as Gowan's Heights, the highest point in Brooklyn, is on cemetery grounds, rising approximately 216 feet (66 m) above sea level. It was the site of an important action during the Battle of Long Island on August 27, 1776. A Revolutionary War monument by Frederick Ruckstull, Altar to Liberty: Minerva, was erected there in 1920. From this height, the bronze Minerva statue gazes towards the Statue of Liberty across New York Harbor.

Green-Wood was less inspired by Père Lachaise Cemetery in Paris, which at the time retained the primarily axial formality of Alexandre Théodore Brongniart's original design, than by Mount Auburn Cemetery in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where a cemetery in a naturalistic park-like landscape in the English manner was first established. It has been called "Brooklyn's first public park by default long before Prospect Park was created." The architecture critic Paul Goldberger was quoted in The New York Times in 1977, saying, "it is the ambition of the New Yorker to live upon the Fifth Avenue, to take his airings in the [Central] Park, and to sleep with his fathers in Green-wood".

Green-Wood Cemetery contains 600,000 graves and 7,000 trees spread out over 478 acres (193 ha). The landscape includes rolling hills and dales, several ponds, and an on-site chapel. In 2017, it received 280,000 visitors. Though at one point there were numerous gravediggers at Green-Wood, as of 2006^[update] there were just a few gravediggers due to a decrease in the number of burials, as well as the limited amount of space for new burials. Because of this shortage of space, several family members may be buried atop each other in some plots.

Several wooden shelters were also built, including one in a Gothic Revival style, one resembling an Italian villa, and another resembling a Swiss chalet. These shelters, designed by Richard Upjohn, had largely deteriorated by the late 20th century except for a ladies' shelter. In 2008, Green-Wood started to acquire a collection of art pertaining to those buried in the cemetery.

Green-Wood Cemetery contains numerous landscape features, which in turn are named after terms that evoke a naturalistic scene. These names include Camellia Path, Halcyon Lake, Oaken Bluff, Sylvan Cliff, and Vista Hill. David Bates Douglass, Green-Wood's landscape architect, mostly kept the cemetery's natural landscaping intact. Much of Douglass's plan is still in place with its original plantings and curving-road systems. The original street names and original cast-iron perimeter fence have been retained, but many of the roads have been paved.