Early in the afternoon of Easter Saturday, I boarded a 4 train at Atlantic Ave.-Barclays Ctr. in Brooklyn and rode it all the way to the Woodlawn station in the Bronx, which is the end of the line and nearly as far as you can go in New York City in that direction. It was a local train. As far as I could tell, there were no expresses to be had on that line that day, though I might have been wrong.

It was a long ride: the better part of two hours. But it was a ride I wanted to take, watching a shifting array of passengers get on and off, and when the train got to the Bronx, watching the borough go by, since the train is elevated up that way.

Some time ago, I wrote about my passage through the South Bronx in 1983: “Before long I was on the #5 IRT, which after leaving Manhattan becomes an elevated train and gave me a full look at the wasteland that is the south Bronx. Blocks of rundown buildings are one thing, but what’s astonishing is how few buildings stand on many blocks, and how much rubble there is. I’ve never seen the aftermath of a city shelled by an enemy, but I’d think it would look like this place.”

That impression of the South Bronx never quite left me. Of course things were different this time, because of the passage of 35 years, and the fact that the 4 takes a very different course than the 5 (which, note, I called the IRT 5 in those days). The 4 train took me past block after block of large apartment buildings, as you’d expect in much of New York, as well as by Yankee Stadium. A casual look at the route of the 5 on Google shows that much redevelopment has been done in that part of the borough, which I’ve also read about.

My goal for the day wasn’t riding the train, but walking through Woodlawn Cemetery. After I first visited Green-Wood Cemetery, I became intrigued with the prospect of seeing Woodlawn, which is an equivalent historic, park-like cemetery in the Bronx, founded in 1863 and so part of the rural cemetery movement. More than 300,000 people are interred there. When Saturday turned out to be clear and almost warm, that tipped my decision toward taking the trip up to Woodlawn.

The cemetery’s web site says: “Our 400-acre cemetery has become an outdoor museum to more than 100,000 visitors who tour our grounds each year. Our celebrated lot owners comprise artists and writers, business moguls, civic leaders, entertainers, jazz musicians, suffragists, and more, including Herman Melville, Joseph Pulitzer, Fiorello LaGuardia, Celia Cruz, Duke Ellington, Irving Berlin, and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, just to name a few.

“The cemetery’s collection of monuments — including over 1300 mausoleums — were designed by American architects, landscape designers, and sculptors. The work of McKim, Mead & White, Carrere & Hastings, Beatrix Farrand, Louis Comfort Tiffany, and Daniel Chester French graces Woodlawn’s grounds.”

I entered at the Jerome Ave. entrance and walked across the cemetery, generally heading northeast along the main road toward the main entrance. The cemetery isn’t kidding about its many mausoleums. A lot of really large ones seem to be concentrated close to the Jerome Ave. entrance. The result of lots of wealthy people imagining they would be remembered when, of course, they are not.

Still, they’re wonderful to look at. Here’s the stately mausoleum of Julius Manger, early 20th century hotel mogul.

A Greek temple of a mausoleum for Francis Patrick Garvan, lawyer and long-time president of the Chemical Foundation.

The resting place of George Ehret, early 20th century beer baron. I was hoping it was the food faddist Arnold Ehret, but no.

Here’s more Egyptian revival. Always makes my day to run across an example of it.
Woolworth? That Woolworth? Yes, indeed. F.W. Woolworth, the king of the dime store, who died in 1919.

Among these major mausoleums, Woolworth was the only one I’d heard of before looking them up. I wasn’t out to look for famous graves, though I knew Woodlawn has plenty. I had no guide or map. I was just walking to see what I could see.

Mausoleums weren’t the entire scope of the cemetery. I saw many more modest markers, or not so modest, some very elegant.

This one was unusual: Jerome Byron Wheeler (1842-1918). Seems like he wanted to be remembered as a man of refined literary tastes. Or at least as a lover of books.

Wiki, at least, claims his mother was a second cousin of Ralph Waldo Emerson. That didn’t pay for the stone and the relief, however: Wheeler owned mines in Colorado.

One more grave of a noted person: Joseph Pulitzer and other family members, which I found by chance.

Near the main entrance, I saw this wood carving.
Glad to see that the cemetery didn’t simply rip the stump out. Like all the best rural cemeteries, Woodlawn is an arboretum too. This is a kind of memorial to the tree.

About three and a half years ago, I took a brisk walk through Green-Wood Cemetery in Brooklyn, a hilly, wooded place featuring a vast array of headstones and funerary art. The very model of a Victorian rural cemetery, you might say, except that the city has grown around it. Also, it’s still an active cemetery in the 21st century.

I wanted to go back, especially since I spent the latter part of my recent trip to New York staying with my nephew Robert and his girlfriend Meredith at their apartment in Brooklyn, which happens to be two subway stops away from the main entrance of Green-Wood. Even better, I discovered that a tour — the Twilight Tour — ran from 6 to 8 p.m. on Friday, March 30, after my work obligations were over.

So I bought a ticket online, and showed up at the main gate not long before 6. The gate itself is a striking bit of Victorian Gothic Revival. Outside the entrance:
None other than Richard Upjohn, the same architect who did Trinity Church Wall Street, designed the gate. Looks like it, too. Inside the entrance:
A resurrection-themed detail on the gate, one of four by John M. Moffitt.
Gray clouds hung over the cemetery and there was occasional drizzle. But I was dressed for it, so that didn’t interfere with the pleasure of walking through Green-Wood again, into parts I didn’t go to last time, so vast is the cemetery.

Even the bare trees and brown-green grass had their charms.

The tour wound up hills and down and around. I didn’t even bother trying to keep track of where we were. I just followed and listened to the guide, who knew a lot and pointed out things you might otherwise miss.

For instance, there aren’t that many Confederates in the cemetery, but there are a few. Such as Col. George Henry Sweet.
We soon came to the highest point in the cemetery, and in fact in Brooklyn, called Battle Hill for its part in a bloody episode in the Battle of Long Island (a.k.a. the Battle of Brooklyn) in the Revolution.

About 100 years ago, that event was memorialized on the hill by a sculpture called “Altar to Liberty: Minerva” by Frederick Ruckstull, which faces toward New York Harbor.

On a clear day, you can see the Statue of Liberty from Minerva’s perch, but we didn’t have a clear day. I understand that that particular the sightline is protected by law, like views of the capitol in Austin.

Also on Battle Hill is a sizable monument to New Yorkers who fought for the Union.

Not far away is the Van Ness-Parsons Egyptian Revival tomb. Pianist, teacher, organist and composer Albert Ross Parsons is interred there, among others.

Clearly they wanted everyone to know that the tomb doesn’t evoke pagan Egypt, but rather Christian Egypt.

Soon we came to the grave of Leonard Bernstein.
Then the more elaborate memorial to Elias Howe, improver of the sewing machine and archenemy of Issac Singer.
As promised, the tour started to become a twilight tour after sunset. The last large tomb I had light enough to shoot was a doozy, though: Charlotte Canda.
I didn’t know the story of Charlotte Canda. The guide informed us. Charlotte, daughter of a wealthy New Yorker, died on her 17th birthday in a carriage accident in 1845. Her tomb is based on unused sketches she made herself a few months earlier, for an aunt of hers who had predeceased Miss Canda.
Restoration efforts have been underway in recent years. According to the guide, back when Green-Wood was treated as a city park, Miss Canda’s tomb was an especially popular place to visit and picnic. The pathos of her story appealed to Victorians, I guess.

We carried on in the near-dark, often using smartphone flashlights, and saw the remarkable gravestone of Cortland Hempstead, chief engineer of the steamship Lexington, which burned and sank in Long Island Sound in January 1840. Of the 143 souls aboard, only four are known to have survived. Hempstead wasn’t one of them.

As seen here, the stone includes a relief based on a Nathaniel Currier lithograph originally published in the New York Sun: “Awful Conflagration of the Steam Boat ‘Lexington’ in Long Island Sound on Monday Eveg Jany 13th 1840, by Which Melancholy Occurrence Over 100 Persons Perished.”

We also saw Green-Wood’s catacombs, which are usually closed to the public. They aren’t remotely as extensive as the catacombs of Rome or Paris, but they were interesting: a long concrete tunnel dug into a hill with some dozens of chambers off to the sides, and people interred in the walls of the chambers. The place was dank and smelled like a cave. According to the guide, the catacombs were a more economic alternative than burial in a plot for a while in the 19th century, but they never really caught on, probably because water always made its way in.

After leaving the catacombs, we passed by the single grave at Green-Wood that I wanted to see more than any other: Boss Tweed. Not for the aesthetics of the marker — it’s large but fairly ordinary — but for making the passing acquaintance of such an infamous scoundrel, when he’s no longer in a position to pick one’s pocket.