Customer Reviews

Brooklyn's Green-Wood Cemetery: New York's Buried Treasure

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I found this book to be an interesting chronology of the individuals who, at some point in time, were the bedrock (sorry about that) of New York's high society as well as its underworld (well, maybe I'm not so sorry).

In addition to its well prepared text, the book is a wealth of contemporary photographs and a rich collection of historically significant pictures and illustrations.

A major portion of the book is devoted to the magnificent monuments, memorials, and statuary that make Green-Wood the "buried treasure" that is it.

I purchased this book directly through Greenwood Cemetery. Greenwood is the most magnificent cemetery and this books uncovers so much of it's rich history. I live very close to it and visit it regularly. It's full of great photographs and you'd be wise to get yourself a copy. Jeff Richman thoroughly explores this Greenwood. I have a framed picture of the Niblo Lion monument hanging on my wall that Mr. Richman was kind enough to inscribe for me. Just one of his many beautiful photographs. Highly recommended.

You don't really have to be from New York to buy this. It's a very nice history of the individuals who populate the Green-Wood Cemetery in Brooklyn. I picked it up after my first trip[ to Green Wood and found it very useful on the second trip. Though it lacks much in the way of maps to find the markers were you planning to seek them out, it is lavishly illustrated with short biographical bits on the more prominent people there mixed into a history of the cemetery.

"It was the ambition of the New Yorker to live upon Fifth Avenue, to take his airings in the [Central] Park, and to sleep with his fathers in Green-Wood."

- From an 1866 New York Times article


Brooklyn's Green-Wood Cemetery - New York's Buried Treasure by Jeffrey I. Richman is full of interesting stories and anecdotes of New York's most colorful citizens. As the dust jacket so eloquently states: "Everybody loves a great story, and Brooklyn's Green-Wood Cemetery has many of New York's great stories to tell. Everyone who was anybody in 19th century New York wanted to be buried there, and they were."

Some names you are sure to recognize - Elias Howe, Jr. (inventor of the sewing machine), Nathaniel Currier and James M. Ives (Currier & Ives prints), Henry Ward Beecher (pastor), Edward R. Murrow (TV and radio journalist), Henry Engelhard Steinway (of piano fame!), Leonard Bernstein (composer), Louis Comfort Tiffany (acclaimed designer).

But the lesser known figures in Richman's book have fascinating histories of their own. For example, you may have seen the movie Glory, the story of the all-black 54th Massachusetts Regiment during the Civil War. General George Crockett Strong, who died leading the charge on Fort Wagner, now reposes at Green-Wood.

Charles Feltman, the Coney Island restaurateur who is credited with inventing the hot dog as we know it, is also buried at Green-Wood. He was born in Germany, where he was intimately familiar with the frankfurter. To help improve business, he decided to put the frank in a special long roll, to make it easier to eat while walking on the street or strolling the beach. The rest, as they say, is history.

The book is lavishly illustrated with a wide variety of historic images from several different sources, showing the author's broad range and scope when composing his narrative. Richman photographed all of the cemetery monuments himself, adding a sense of place to each of Green-Wood's permanent residents.

Although the book is a bit pricey, it is well worth the money. It is only available in hardcover, and is 240 pages long. It is written as a collection of short biographies that you can pick up and read now and again.

But I will warn you: Once I started reading this book, I couldn't put it down!

Beautiful book, wonderfully written, about the most amazing and historic site in the great borough of Brooklyn, NY.

This book is like People magazine -- of the past! Leafing through this book, I picked up fascinating details about the famous and also the not-so-well-known individuals who are interred in Green-Wood. But I also gained a whole new understanding of the role that a cemetery, and indeed this Historic Landmark, plays in reflecting the past, its individuals and its values. And Richman can write. This is a great book to add to your collection or to your coffee table. Recommended.