Green-Wood Cemetery

 It is hard to imagine the contrast between the otherworldly quality of Brookyn's Greenwood cemetery and the ugliness of much of the industrial wasteland that surrounds it. When it was built, in the eighteen hundreds, it was a distant parcel of land in the then city of Brooklyn, surrounded by farms, mostly, and quite a ways from the Manhattan clientele it hoped to attract. Like Central Park, which was inspired by the sylvan, romanticized landscaping of Greenwood, the cemetery established a kind of capsule which was protected from the energetic activities of development around it. Soon after entering the landmark gates at Fifth Avenue and 25th Street, you become absorbed in another time.