STILL LIFE

The “forever business” of Green-Wood Cemetery.

- BY PAIGE WILLIAMS

A history of New York can be found at Green-Wood. Staff refer to the nearly six hundred thousand people interred there, including Jean-Michel Basquiat, Leonard Bernstein, and Boss Tweed—as “permanent residents.”

New York City was gridded for life, not death, and by the late eighteen-twenties there was no good place to put all the bodies. Burial grounds were brimming. New Yorkers walked around holding vinegar-soaked handkerchiefs to their faces, believing that “putrid miasmas” emanated from graveyards and killed people. Scientists were only starting to piece together that contaminated water, not flawed character, caused cholera; that smallpox probably originated in rodents; and that yellow fever was the vector work of the lowly mosquito, not the result of immigration or rotting vegetables. A case of yellow fever, a disease that inspired what one doctor called “great terror,” often started with a headache, followed by a high temperature, a slow heart rate, delirium, a sallow complexion, and bleeding from the eyes, nose, and gums. A telltale sign of imminent demise was “ropy mucous coffee-ground black vomit.” Sweet death: no relief. “The increment of the city” was overtaking one graveyard after another and exposing the dead to “violation in the opening of streets, and other city improvements,” David Bates Douglass, a prominent surveyor and civil engineer, wrote. Finding a solution was a matter of “great and urgent solicitude.”