NYC #41: Horace Greeley, Green-Wood Cemetery (11), Brooklyn

'HORACE GREELEY

BORN

FEBRUARY 3, 1811.

DIED

NOVEMBER 29, 1872.

–––––––––––

FOUNDER OF THE

NEW YORK TRIBUNE'

 

 

 

 

NYC #40: Ann Stephens, Green-Wood Cemetery (10), Brooklyn

Ann Stephens (1813–86) founded the Portland Magazine in Maine, edited The Ladies Companion, and was a writer of poems and dime novels. She also had a magazine called Mrs. Stephens' Illustrated New Monthly.

NYC #37: Jean-Michel Basquiat, Green-Wood Cemetery (7), Brooklyn

'JEAN-MICHEL

BASQUIAT

ARTIST

DEC. 1960   AUG. 1988'

 

Jean-Michel Basquiat's grave is one of the most popular and famous in Green-Wood Cemetery. Basquiat was born in Brooklyn and died in his Manhattan studio of a heroin overdose.

NYC #36: James Weldon Johnson, Green-Wood Cemetery (6), Brooklyn

James Weldon Johnson by Carl Van Vechten.

 

'JOHNSON

JAMES WELDON

1871–1938

GRACE NAIL

1885–1976'

 

So there we have it, the grave of James Weldon Johnson, with his wife Grace in the Nail plot. By far the most significant writer in Green-Wood Cemetery but not mentioned on the cemetery's map. And the Jeffrey I. Richman map of the same just lists the pulp novelist Laura Jean Libbey and, as it says, James Kirke Paulding of 'Peter Piper Picked a Peck' fame. Omissions of deafening silence.

NYC #35: James Kirke Paulding, Green-Wood Cemetery (5), Brooklyn

James Kirke Paulding (1778–1860) was a friend of Washington Irving and had links with the Knickerbocker group. A disturbing sentence in Paulding's Wikipedia entry (accessed 08/19/15) reads 'Paulding's View of Slavery in the United States (1836) was a comprehensive defense of both Black slavery and America's claim to be a bastian [sic] of liberty against the attacks of abolitionists and European critics'. Um. Apart from Laura Jean Libbey, this is the only person included in the 'Writers' section of Jeffrey I. Richman's map of Green-Wood Cemetery. But I wouldn't recommend that anyone look for the grave, unless they're as fanatical as us: this is a very small plaque with only Paulding's name indicated as above, and at the time of visiting it was hidden under a bush.

NYC #34: Laura Jean Libbey, Green-Wood Cemetery (4), Brooklyn

'LAURA JEAN LIBBEY

DIED

OCTOBER 25, 1924'

 

The grave of Laura Jean Libbey (1842–1924) is very impressive, but then this author was by the standards of the time a very successful and wealthy woman: altogether she wrote eighty-two sensational, romantic dime novels aimed at female readers, and had a lucrative editorial position.

 

As an indication of the kind of material she churned out, Kidnapped at the Altar; Or, The Romance of that Saucy Jessie Bain and Pretty Madcap Dorothy; Or, How She Won a Lover give a strong clue. The first paragraph of the latter book reads:

'"It's so hard for working-girls to get acquainted. They never meet a rich young man, and they don't want a poor one. It seems to me that a girl who has to commence early to work for her living might just as well give up forever all hopes of a lover and of marrying," declared Nadine Holt, one of the prettiest girls in the immense book-bindery, to the group of companions who were gathered about her. "It's get up at daylight, swallow your breakfast, and hurry to work; and it's dark before you are out on the street again. How can we ever expect to meet a marriageable fellow?"'

 

'Spew out wonderful literature like this?' I'm tempted to answer.

 

Green-Wood Cemetery hands out a cemetery map to visitors with the locations of twenty-two remains circled. Although Laura Jean Libbey's isn't one of them, a mere three dollars will buy you another map devised by a certain Jeffrey I. Richman, which locates well over two hundred graves. This map divides the graves into several categories, although the main interest is in people connected with the Civil War, 'Pioneers', 'Entertainers', 'Great Stories', etc. The 'Writers' section contains as many examples as the 'Dogs' and the 'Spirits' sections, and even (and I'm yawning endlessly here) the 'Baseball' section has three characters. Needless to say, this Jeffrey I. Richman guy considers Laura Jean Libbey worthy of note, which she certainly is, but...

NYC #33: Henry Bergh, Green-Wood Cemetery (3), Brooklyn

'Humility of Man Before a Group of Agelesss Animals
By Wilhelm Hunt Diederich (1884–1953)
and John Terken (1912–1993)

 

This bas-relief, a tribute to the bond between man and animals, was given by its renowned artists to the ASPCA circa 1953 and hung on its Manhattan headquarters until 1992. Generations of New Yorkers viewed this iconic sculpture while passing the ASPCA (American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals) headquarters along the FDR Drive at 92nd Street. In 2006, this sculpture was installed at Green-Wood Cemetery, below the grave of Henry Bergh, the founder and first presidnet of the ASPCA, in his honor and in celebration of the 140th anniverary of the founding of the ASPCA, the first humane organization in the Americas. It will remain here on permanent loan, inspiring kindness and compassion to all living things.'

NYC #32: Henry Beecher Stowe, Green-Wood Cemetery (2), Brooklyn

Henry Beecher Stowe was an abolitionist, lecturer and general social reformer famously accused of adultery, and (equally famously) exonerated: some people thought scandalously so. He was also the brother of Harriet Beecher Stowe.

His published works include:

Seven Lectures to Young Men (1844)
Star Papers (1855)
Summer in the Soul (1858)
Prayers from the Plymouth Pulpit (1867)
Norwood, or Village Life in New England (1868) (a novel).

NYC #31: Alice and Phoebe Cary, Green-Wood Cemetery (1), Brooklyn

The tomb of the poet sisters Alice Cary (1820–71) and Phoebe Cary (1824–1871), most of whose poems were published together and posthumously:

Poems of Alice and Phoebe Cary (1849)
A Memorial of Alice and Phoebe Cary With Some of Their Later Poems (1873)
The Last Poems of Alice and Phoebe Cary (1873)
Ballads for Little Folk by Alice and Phoebe Cary (1873)