Inside the Brooklyn cemetery where the dead live in miniature houses

Green-Wood Cemetery opened in 1838, with graves spread across 478 acres of hills, valleys, ponds, and paths, making it one of the first rural cemeteries in America. The third-oldest cemetery in New York City, its extensive natural landscape inspired the creation of Central and Prospect Parks and, due to the impressive and varied constructions that house the dead within its walls, the cemetery was designated a National Historic Landmark in 2006.

In its heyday, at the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th century, the cemetery attracted half a million visitors a year, making it the nation’s second-greatest tourist attraction after Niagara Falls. Today, Green-Wood Cemetery is home to 580,000 permanent residents, including some of Brooklyn’s finest classical musicians, corrupt politicians, military generals, baseball players, robber barons and artists, Jean-Michel Basquiat being the most recent and most famous.

Green-Wood Cemetery houses more than 800 mausoleums, the largest collection of 19th- and early 20th-century Egyptian Revival, Gothic Revival and Victorian constructions, faithfully reflecting the progression of architectural styles over the centuries outside the cemetery walls, though always in miniature.

One of the earliest and most popular designs for tombs was based on residential homes in Brooklyn, but also vice versa. Following the completion of the Brooklyn Bridge in 1883, a building boom swept the city, with brownstones — that is, homes with façades covered in a thin veneer of Triassic-Jurassic sandstone, pink when dug up from the earth but, over time, oxidizing into chocolate brown — becoming the most popular style of home.

Spacious, two- or three-story brownstones, built with classical columns at the entrances and stoops designed to elevate the homes above the mud, garbage and fecal matter, equine and human, in the street, were Brooklyn’s response to Manhattan’s mansions and row houses.

Within Brooklyn’s oldest cemetery, miniature brownstones were among the first dwellings. Several 1820s brownstone tombs and mausoleums, originally located in the burial ground of the First Reformed Dutch Church of Brooklyn, were relocated to Green-Wood when it first opened, and some of the oldest and smallest mausoleums constructed in the cemetery were also made of brownstone, complete with stairs and columns in the entranceway. 

These impressive constructions, made from easily available, inexpensive materials, surely influenced the architecture beyond the walls of the cemetery.

Another of the most popular styles of death architecture, especially among the earliest mausoleums, is Egyptian Revival. Besides several mini-pyramids, there are also dozens of tiny, dark, windowless, lugubrious stone tombs, many sunk into hillsides, that hark back to distant, ancient burial rituals. Many of the earliest mausoleums, including that of the man who sold the land that would later become Green-Wood Cemetery and who was one of the first people buried there, were built in this style.

In the late 1800s, Egyptian Revival architecture became a popular style not only in cemeteries but also for jails and prisons, as it gave these monumental constructions a brutal, foreboding appearance. The Tombs prison in New York City, occupying a whole city block, was one of the largest and most imposing of these structures. 

The English writer Charles Dickens complained of the place: “What is this dismal fronted pile of bastard Egyptian, like an enchanter’s palace in a melodrama?” and described how “Into this narrow, grave-like place, men are brought out to die.”

The Tombs was an urban, public institution built on an inner-city swamp. Green-Wood Cemetery, with dozens of tiny tombs similar in style to the Manhattan jail, was a suburban, private space nestled in the bucolic hills of suburbia. 

The Tombs represented, for the masses of incarcerated immigrants, the urban poor and anarchists, a gateway to hell, while the tiny tombs within the cemetery were conceived as the entranceway to heaven for the mostly wealthy families of European descent, including Masons and members of other powerful social, religious and political groups, who are interred there.

The fact that certain architectural styles could be used for private homes, public houses of detention and private eternal resting places shows not only how death is the great inspiration for the cultural works of humankind, but also how a single aesthetic form can fulfill radically different functions.