Greenwood Cemetery

Popular on travel sites and guides today are grave tours through noteworthy cemeteries. Cemeteries have their own interesting architecture: in low-lying New Orleans, French settlers built St. Louis Cemetery with above-ground tombs, to protect against the encroaching sea. Today, visitors come to these burial grounds to brush elbows with ghosts and visit historic marble tombs and crypts. It was customary, in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, for families to buy grave sites for future generations and extended family. Some tombs could hold more than a hundred bodies—once the remains were cremated, that is. Ashes were poured into a velvet urn bag, which was tied with a golden, tasselled rope and placed into a tomb.In addition to funeral rituals, cemeteries can tell us as much about life in a particular time and place. Early-nineteenth-century New Orleans was a relatively progressive city, where free people of color played integral roles in the city’s business and culture, despite living in segregated neighborhoods. The Catholic Church, which continues to have a strong presence in New Orleans, did not segregate any of its cemeteries in the city. Thirteen hundred miles north, Brooklyn’s Green-Wood Cemetery, which opened in 1838, reflects a different story.In nineteenth-century New York City, racial and class disparities stratified both the living and the dead. In Green-Wood, African-American bodies were laid to rest in seven lots along the southwestern edge of the vast grounds. Free black Americans were buried in what were colloquially known as the Colored Lots, a section of land where bodies were buried without a foundation. In the course of the next century and a half, the lots were seriously neglected. The tombstones eroded, and some sank and were largely swallowed. Their disappearance parallels other parts of New York City’s history that tend to get ignored, such as the city’s grim past as a high-traffic port for the illegal international slave trade.Reckoning with this shameful past, the restoration team at Green-Wood brough...

I like this church, but I miss my house, there we have a big yard with chickens and in the summer my mom sets a plastic pool up for us," Dulce says. Cinthya Santos Briones Twelve large banners filled with photographs of immigrants young and old—from Indonesia, Ecuador, Guatemala, Iraq and Colombia, playing, getting ready for bed, celebrating birthdays with family and friends—hang on the iron fence of Green-wood Cemetery, a nearly 500-acre historic burial ground in Brooklyn. These undocumented immigrants, photographed by Cinthya Santos Briones, are being protected from deportation, often in churches, in the US, and the scenes of their daily lives make up the outdoor exhibition Living Inside Sanctuary (until 7 April). “[I am] trying to dignify them because they are at some point the leaders of the sanctuary movement in this country,” the artist says. Santos Briones said the exhibition’s placement—all along Fourth Avenue between 34th and 36th Streets—is deliberate effort to engage a wide range of communities with public art, and thousands of passersby from some of Brooklyn’s most diverse neighborhoods can now view the photos every day. “This installation is a thrilling opportunity to engage our neighbours, through art, in timely conversations about the very real struggles that impact communities here and across the country,” says Harry Weil, the director of public programmes and special projects at Green-wood, and the curator of the show. The photo display Living Inside Sanctuary (until 7 April) has been installed on Green-wood Cemetery's wrought iron fence along Fourth Avenue between 34th and 36th Streets Courtesy of Green-wood Cemetery Santos Briones, who was born in Mexico and worked as an anthropologist in indigenous communities there before becoming an artist, now lives in Bay Ridge and has been working with sanctuary communities since 2017. S...