The Green-Wood Cemetery
The Green-Wood Cemetery brings people closer to the world as it is and was, by memorializing the dead and bringing to life the art, history, and natural beauty of New York City.
The Green-Wood Cemetery was founded in 1838 as one of America’s first rural cemeteries. Still an active cemetery, the Green-Wood of today is also a cultural institution, an outdoor museum that tells the history and evokes the cultures of the borough, the city and the nation. Today, Green-Wood’s 478 acres serve as the final resting place for over 570,000 permanent residents.
Art, history, and nature in the heart of Brooklyn.
Free and open to the public year round. Experience History at Green-Wood. Established in 1838: A National Historic Landmark.
Founded in 1838 and now a National Historic Landmark, Green-Wood was one of the first rural cemeteries in America. By the early 1860s, it had earned an international reputation for its magnificent beauty and became the prestigious place to be buried, attracting 500,000 visitors a year, second only to Niagara Falls as the nation’s greatest tourist attraction. Crowds flocked there to enjoy family outings, carriage rides, and sculpture viewing in the finest of first generation American landscapes. Green-Wood’s popularity helped inspire the creation of public parks, including New York City’s Central and Prospect Parks.
Green-Wood is 478 spectacular acres of hills, valleys, glacial ponds, and paths, throughout which exists one of the largest outdoor collections of nineteenth- and twentieth-century statuary and mausoleums. Four seasons of beauty from century-and-a-half-old trees offer a peaceful oasis to visitors, as well as its 570,000 permanent residents, including Leonard Bernstein, Boss Tweed, Charles Ebbets, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Louis Comfort Tiffany, Horace Greeley, Civil War generals, baseball legends, politicians, artists, entertainers, and inventors.
A magnet for history buffs and bird watchers, Green-Wood is a Revolutionary War historic site (the Battle of Long Island was fought in 1776 across what is now its grounds), a designated site on the Civil War Discovery Trail, and a registered member of the Audubon Cooperative Sanctuary System.
On September 27, 2006, Green-Wood was designated a National Historic Landmark by the United States Department of the Interior, which recognized its national significance in art, architecture, landscaping, and history.
Green-Wood is a world-renowned arboretum featuring a dynamic living collection of trees and shrubs. Some of Green-Wood’s oldest specimens predate the Cemetery’s founding in 1838, and the collection continues to grow—each new planting is selected for its climate adaptiveness, wildlife value, enhancement of the beauty of the landscape, and resilience. Every year Green-Wood’s living collection is responsible for sequestering 264,000 lbs. of carbon dioxide, removing 12,000 lbs. of pollution from the air we breathe, and mitigating 2,620,000 gallons of stormwater from overwhelming Brooklyn’s sewage system.
The Green-Wood Historic Fund, a not-for-profit 501c3 charitable organization. Contributions are tax deductible to the extent allowed by law.
