June 9, 2025 Issue

Pick of the Issue this week is Paige Williams’ superb “Still Life.” It’s an exploration of New York City’s biggest graveyard – Green-Wood Cemetery, in Brooklyn. Williams roams its four hundred and seventy-eight acres. Nearly six hundred thousand people are buried there. She describes the place as a “sculpture garden.” It contains more than two hundred and fifty thousand monuments: 

Owls, horses, baseballs, clasped hands, winged hourglasses, and empty beds are among the iconography that I have seen incised on the funerary surfaces. The angels (and they are many) weep and sag, but they also look heavenward. Lambs mean children. Broken flower stems and shorn columns symbolize early death. There are sarcophagi and plinths and cenotaphs. Lord at the obelisks.   

She visits some of its hundreds of mausolea:

Topography is destiny: dozens of mausolea were tucked into those deglaciated cliffs, and during grassier seasons they resemble thatched-roof hobbit houses with bronze or stone doors. Other mausolea are freestanding. Some have Tiffany stained-glass windows. The tomb of Charles Feltman, a restaurateur who supposedly invented the hot dog, is nicer than my apartment. There are four front steps bracketed by two huge urns, half a dozen Corinthian columns, and six life-size maidens, possible goddesses. Atop a cupola, the archangel Michael stands seven feet tall, his sword lowered, facing a Burger King. Feltman’s eternal neighbors include the Sommers, the Lynans, the Archers, and the Gales. The Maniscalcos might like to know that their guardian angel has come to miss her marble arms.

She talks with people who work there, e.g., Rich Moylan, Green-Wood’s president of the past thirty-nine years; Neela Wickremesinghe, Green-Wood’s chief conservator; Jahongir Usmanov, Green-Wood’s operations manager; John Argenziano, the cemetery’s head of security.

She observes a grave being dug:

It was nine-thirty in the morning and so windy that miniature flags on graves were horizontal. The gravediggers were preparing for a funeral at two. Four neon-orange stakes marked off a rectangle in front of a headstone. The stone was inscribed with the name of a woman buried at nine feet; her husband was coming in at seven.

She goes on a Green-Wood tour led by Marge Raymond, “a seasoned singer with a blond updo and sunglasses the size of T-bones.” Paige writes, 

The best stop on her tour is Battle Hill. My trolley unloaded, and we climbed stone steps to the 1776 battleground, two hundred and eighteen feet above sea level. Marge approached an enormous bronze statue of Minerva, the goddess of wisdom and war. Minerva faces New York Harbor. Marge told us to turn and follow her gaze. We did, and found the Statue of Liberty staring back.

The piece brims with interesting facts and observations:

Green-Wood’s earliest burial lots, typically fourteen by twenty-seven feet, cost a hundred dollars apiece; today, a grave starts at twenty-one thousand. 

A single grave may hold up to six people: three casketed, three cremated. Green-Wood stacks clients at depths of nine, seven, and five feet. 

A grave at Green-Wood is the only real estate that some New Yorkers ever own. 

Only at Green-Wood is it possible to enjoy a show performed on a Steinway concert grand piano near the tomb of the actual Steinways.

“Still Life” is the liveliest piece about a cemetery that I’ve ever read. Highly recommended.