The Outdoor Museum

In being encouraged to visit a museum, I first wanted to explore what a museum is. During the Night at the Museum, we were taught that a museum is defined as being a place where we are encouraged not just to look but also to see. We were encouraged to enter the conversations that the pieces of art on display are having with themselves.

In my trip to a museum, I decided to visit the Greenwood Cemetery. The Greenwood Cemetery’s official site describes its institution as the following:

Green-Wood of today is also a cultural institution, an outdoor museum that tells the history and evokes the cultures of the borough, the city and the nation. Today, Green-Wood’s 478 acres serve as the final resting place for over 570,000 permanent residents.

This is an eerie way to describe a cemetery: a burial site and arboretum that serves as the “permanent” home to many well-known figures. The monuments and landscape is designed to resemble Gilded Age life of the 19th and 20th centuries. The Gilded Age was a time when it seemed like America was prospering because of a thin layer of wealth that glimmered in the hands of the most wealthy while many others lived deep in property. This cemetery was built in 1838 as a rural cemetery to accommodate the many deaths of New York City people who died due to a disease outbreak that was believed to have stemmed from drinking dirty water. People were normally buried in churchyards until a widespread increase in death tolls in New York City led to a reimagining of the way that cemeteries and burying people worked. A new style of cemetery was created and people were buried in rural areas. This design was carried into New York and reflected in the Green Wood Cemetery.

Although it was progressive in the nature of its art and burial sites, I found it interesting that the burial sites had been initially segregated. People were separated as much in death as they were in life. The Freedom Lots include many soldiers from the Civil War, people who were enslaved, children of people who were enslaved, and freed before their deaths but were never able to truly escape the world they lived in even after dying. Their lots were neglected, built with no foundations, which eventually caused them to cave in, and were not properly labeled. John Munroe, for instance, was a sergeant that served in a Civil War regiment shortly after the Emancipation Proclamation was signed. This relates to the movie that we watched in class about the Civil War. The number of Black soldiers fighting in the Civil War after the Emancipation Proclamation skyrocketed, according to the site, and also became an important stepping stone towards citizenship and a sense of equality in a new way.

A restoration project by high school interns has allowed for them to recover some of the bodies and memorials and to rename the lots to become known as the “freedom” lots instead of being known as the “colored” lots, which made me reflect on the impact that we, even as youth, can have on our communities. This was an initiative that began as the result of young students, not the institution, not the managers, not the directors. When the displays that we are shown and the information that we are presented with depend on the people that choose them, it is important to have a voice and bring light to what we find important.

The Greenwood Cemetery also includes many fallen soldiers from World War I, many of whom were soldiers or nurses who died in Europe and had family that brought them back home or died near Greenwood. Among these soliders, committing suicide on the way home after the war was not uncommon. One such instance are the Cromwell sisters. They were born into a wealthy family, descendants of the British Oliver Cromwell, and Gladys and Dorothea Cromwell decided to volunteer in France as nurses during the war. On their way back to their family that was urging them to come home, the two sisters headed out onto the deck of the ship before parting ways and each jumping off of the rails into the icy water beneath them. Although they were both buried in France, they have a memorial plaque in Greenwood Cemetery and many of the members from their family are buried here in Greenwood.

When we learn about wars in school, we always focus on the statistics of how many casualties occurred and how many deaths occurred on each side, on every acre of land, or in each battlefield. Many commemorate the soldiers that came home and those that didn’t. Nurses, teachers, and families are often overlooked and forgotten when it comes to these numbers and statistics about those who were harmed during the war. The pain that the Cromwell sisters exhibited is just one example of such a story.

Their memorial plaque is a beautiful tribute to the sisters’ lives, especially in the autumn as the leaves fall and nature decays. As the world around us crumbles and we are surrounded by the stories of everyone who came before us, there is an ironic enlivening feeling that reminds us that we are no greater than sky or the trees, which is perhaps a reason why Greenwood Cemetery is known as the “living” cemetery.

The image above is not one that I took, I didn’t find it respectful to take pictures of the cemetery. However, this is an image that I believe captured the autumn I described above.