Do you remember Roy Smeck, guitarist and banjo legend from the 1930s?
“We have him here,” said Richard J. Moylan the other day, in a cluttered office that looked about three weeks from moving-out day.
It is a phrase Mr. Moylan — 70, with a robust head of white hair and a pleasantly chatty manner — uses often, or did until recently. Last Friday, he retired from Green-Wood Cemetery in Brooklyn, where he had worked for the last 53 years, first as a lawn cutter and since 1986 as president, and thus de facto mayor to the grounds’ 570,000 permanent residents.
Around the office were a half-dozen Roy Smeck signature guitars that Mr. Moylan had collected for the cemetery, along with books, CDs and artwork associated with other people interred there.
“We have Leonard Bernstein,” he said. Also F.A.O. Schwartz (toys), Eberhard Faber (pencils) and Samuel Morse (code). But of the filmmaker Jonas Mekas, who was cremated at the cemetery in 2019, Mr. Moylan lamented, “I don’t think we have him.”
(It is a sore spot with Mr. Moylan that so many families choose to scatter their loved ones’ remains rather than entomb at least some of them at Green-Wood, where future generations might gather to visit them.)
Green-Wood, which sits on 478 rolling, tree-filled acres in a semi-industrial neighborhood that real estate agents call Greenwood Heights, occupies a distinctive place in New York City and in the development of American cemeteries. First opened in 1838, it was in the 19th century the second-most-popular attraction in the state, after Niagara Falls, and inspired the competition to design Central Park and Prospect Park.
Mr. Moylan, who started working at the cemetery during law school and never left, has the rare distinction of taking over an established institution and utterly transforming it, turning it into a National Historic Landmark with 450,000 annual visitors.
On a garishly perfect June afternoon, the cemetery’s towering neo-Gothic arch entryway, home to a group of noisy monk parakeets, welcomed a few dozen visitors to the grounds. (All proceeded on foot; the cemetery does not allow bicycles, scooters or roller skates.)
A couple of trolleys, used for weekend guided tours, sat idle on one of the extensive, labyrinthine paths. Smoke from an earlier ceremony wafted from a large dish by a koi pond in an area known as the Tranquillity Garden. The garden and smoke reflect the changing neighborhood around Green-Wood, which has become heavily Asian American.
When Mr. Moylan took over Green-Wood in 1986, the cemetery was closed to tourists or people drawn to the open space. Visitors had to tell guards at the gate which grave they intended to visit.
“That was when people were breaking in and stealing stained-glass windows and stealing bronze bars and doors off mausoleums,” Mr. Moylan said. Even so, he allowed, the tight security was choking off the life of the institution.
“I mean, Ken Jackson from Columbia, he was turned away,” Mr. Moylan said, referring to the Bancroft Prize-winning historian and author of “Silent Cities: The Evolution of the American Cemetery.” If people tried to take photos within the cemetery, guards would rip the film out of their cameras.
Then, around 1999, Mr. Moylan was attending a cremation convention in Baltimore (as one does) and decided to visit a nearby cemetery where John Wilkes Booth is buried, among other historical figures. “And on this Saturday afternoon, there was no one in the place — no one,” Mr. Moylan said.
“And I thought, This can’t happen in Brooklyn. We can’t have 478 acres of land, and we’re basically not allowing people to enjoy it.”
Mr. Moylan started to court visitors, in part for financial reasons — as more people choose cremation over more remunerative burials, cemeteries have fallen on hard times. Opening the gates gives people more opportunities to consider spending eternity there. Current plot prices start around $22,000.
The grounds, in turn, had plenty to draw visitors. “Some of the great sculptors at the turn of the last century were designing and adorning mausoleums and headstones,” said Gwen Pier, executive director of the National Sculpture Society. “So they have some pretty remarkable works there.”
Mr. Moylan began offering book talks and guided tours of the more than 250,000 monuments and 700 varieties of trees. Not everybody was happy about Green-Wood’s becoming a destination. But if people complained about his letting the rabble in, he said, “I told them, ‘You buy your plot, that’s all you’re entitled to.’”
He acquired paintings by artists buried there, amassing a collection of 650 works by 250 artists, though none by Jean-Michel Basquiat or Chuck Close, which are out of the cemetery’s price range. (Mr. Basquiat’s grave is probably the cemetery’s most visited, Mr. Moylan said.)
“Green-Wood was always on the map, but he’s made it a significant cultural institution,” Dr. Jackson said, forgiving the cemetery for once barring him.
Still, the guards occasionally refuse to let some visitors enter. “Goths,” Mr. Moylan said. “We have to say, ‘No, you can’t come in looking like that.’”
The cemetery, which is a nonprofit organization, created a second nonprofit, also led by Mr. Moylan, to raise money and manage the art collection and programming.
There are now Memorial Day concerts and Day of the Dead ceremonies (another nod to changes in the neighborhood, which includes a growing Latino community), complete with food trucks and dancing, that draw crowds in the thousands. There are Death Cafes, programs for children and nighttime tours of the grounds. Once a month, death educators foster contemplation during an evening of crocheting and knitting.
“Grieving and Weaving is this big hit,” said Amy Cunningham, a funeral director who has done a lot of work at Green-Wood and whom Mr. Moylan says kept him up-to-date on changes in funeral practices.
Ms. Cunningham recalled attending a pandemic-era concert by Simone Dinnerstein, at which the audience, observing social distancing, followed her by candlelight to each of five pianos placed around the grounds.
“I thought, My God, here I am in my local cemetery, and it seemed so much more sublime than Carnegie Hall,” Ms. Cunningham said. “I just felt so happy to be a New Yorker.”
Over the years, Mr. Moylan added green burials and was persuaded to allow the grass to grow wild in one area to attract pollinators, a practice that has upset some families whose relatives are buried there. The cemetery created an artist-in-residence program and commissioned new sculptures, including an obelisk by the French conceptual artist Sophie Calle, with a slot into which visitors are invited to slip notes describing their secrets.
Heidi Lau, a ceramist who in 2021 became Green-Wood’s first artist in residence, said she walked the grounds every day to find a theme for her commission. “Seeing the seasons change and thinking about the garden as a metaphor for immortality and change, which is also a concept in Chinese gardens,” she said. The result was an abstract installation, now in the permanent collection, that she called “Gardens as Cosmic Terrains.”
But Green-Wood is a working cemetery, and it must tend to the dead. During the worst of the pandemic, its crematory ran for 18 hours a day, and still could not keep up. (My mother was cremated there in June 2020; five of us held a brief vigil in the crematory’s loading dock as the next body was brought in.)
Work is now finishing on a $34 million welcome center and gallery in a restored 1895 greenhouse across the street. Money came from the city and state, recognizing Green-Wood as a cultural institution, not just a place where people are buried. Mr. Moylan had hoped the welcome center would open before his retirement, but he has left it to his successor, Meera Joshi, a former deputy mayor who resigned earlier this year when the Trump administration moved to drop corruption charges against Mayor Eric Adams, in apparent exchange for his help with the president’s deportation agenda.
It makes sense for someone who has spent his life in a cemetery to develop a particular relationship with death. Mr. Moylan, who is divorced and has no children, does not have a will — despite a quadruple bypass operation in 2020 — and does not much care whether he will be buried or cremated. “I’m not a big believer in an afterlife, so I don’t think it’ll really matter very much,” he said.
He said he likes to visit the graves of his parents and the writer Pete Hamill, who bought a plot near that of Boss Tweed, the 19th-century Tammany Hall power broker and scofflaw. “If you’re going to spend an eternity,” Mr. Hamill once explained, “better with a rogue than with a saint who would drive you into slumber.”
As for Mr. Moylan’s next chapter, he hopes to travel to some of the world’s great cemeteries that he has not visited, and to brush up on his guitar skills, which he had once hoped would lead him to Roy Smeckian glory. He kept one of the Smeck guitars, a Gibson he had bought himself; the remainder, along with all the art, is now Ms. Joshi’s domain.
Beyond that, there is a planned move to Staten Island, followed, eventually, by a return to Green-Wood, with or without the possibility of an afterlife. “Ultimately,” he said, “I will be with Mom and Dad.”
John Leland is a reporter covering life in New York City for The Times.
The post He Made Green-Wood Cemetery a Destination for the Living appeared first on New York Times.
