Green Wood Cemetery

Green-Wood opened in 1838, when Brooklyn was still a separate city and New York was beginning to imagine new kinds of public landscape. Its founders laid out rolling ground, ponds, roads, and family plots as a rural cemetery: a burial place designed for reflection and for visitors who came to walk its grounds. In the nineteenth century, the cemetery became a popular destination as well as a place to mourn. Its broad paths and cultivated scenery brought city residents into contact with a landscape of hills and trees beyond crowded streets.