Quick answer
Green-Wood Cemetery is the 478-acre rural cemetery founded in 1838 in western Brooklyn, now a National Historic Landmark with about 570,000 graves. Its Gothic Revival gates, hilltop monuments and monk parakeet colony make it a park, sculpture garden and wildlife refuge in one.
Full transcript
A park that happens to hold graves
Green-Wood Cemetery opened in 1838, when Brooklyn's churchyards had run out of room and cities were deciding what to do with the dead. The landscape architect David Bates Douglass designed it as a rural retreat — rolling hills, ponds, curving roads — and the public treated it as a park long before Brooklyn had one. By the 1840s tens of thousands of visitors came each season, and the crowds helped convince New York to build Central Park. Enter at the 25th Street gate, the brownstone Gothic Revival arch built between 1861 and 1865, and look up: a colony of monk parakeets nests in the clock tower spires, 106 feet above the street.
Brooklyn's highest ground
The cemetery covers 478 acres and holds about 570,000 graves — Samuel Morse, Boss Tweed, Henry Ward Beecher, the engravers Currier and Ives. The best view is at Battle Hill, the highest natural point in Brooklyn at roughly 216 feet, where a skirmish of the Battle of Long Island was fought on August 27, 1776. A bronze Minerva was raised there in 1920, gazing toward the Statue of Liberty across the harbor. Climb the hill and stand beside her for the city's most underrated skyline view.
How to do it
Allow an afternoon and walk without a route; the curving roads and 7,000 trees make getting lost the point. Find the soldiers' monuments, the Steinway mausoleum and the grave markers of Currier and Ives, then finish at the chapel near the main gate. Bring binoculars for the parakeets, go on a weekday morning, and leave time to sit on a bench above Halcyon Lake. Stand at the Battle Hill statue for five minutes before you leave.