Now stretching across 478 acres of gardens and rolling hills overlooking New York Harbor and the Manhattan skyline, Green-Wood Cemetery was established in 1838 as a 178-acre civic venture by prominent New Yorkers, led by Henry Pierrepont. The highest point in Brooklyn and the site of a major Revolutionary War battle, the cemetery was designed by engineer David Bates Douglass. As its first superintendent, landscape gardener Almerin Hotchkiss, working with Zebedee Cook, oversaw its expansion by more than 200 acres.  Hotchkiss’ undulating, sweeping curves are consistent with both Douglass’s design intent and the site’s distinctive terrain.  In 1849, leading horticulturist Andrew Jackson Downing wrote that, of America’s rural cemeteries, Green-Wood was “the largest and unquestionably the finest . . . grand, dignified and park-like.”

The 5th Avenue Gothic Revival gate was designed by Richard Upjohn in 1861.  Among its nearly 600,000 burials are William M. (“Boss”) Tweed, inventors Elias Howe and Samuel F.B. Morse, artists William Merritt Chase, George Catlin, George Bellows, Eastman Johnson, and Jean-Michel Basquiat, stained-glass designers Louis Comfort Tiffany and John LaFarge, composers Leonard Bernstein and Fred Ebb, newspaper publisher Horace Greeley, actor Frank (Wizard of Oz) Morgan, abolitionist Henry Ward Beecher, printmakers Currier and Ives, and over 4,000 Civil War veterans. Green-Wood Cemetery was designated a National Historic Landmark in 2006.