Beyond the Village and Back: Green-Wood Cemetery

In our series Beyond the Village and Back, we take a look at some great landmarks throughout New York City outside of Greenwich Village, the East Village, and NoHo, celebrate their special histories, and reveal their (sometimes hidden) connections to the Village. You can also explore via our Beyond the Village and Back: Manhattan South of 72nd Street Map and our Beyond the Village and Back: Manhattan North of 72nd Street and the Outer Boroughs Map.

On April 18, 1838, the State of New York chartered a new and very large cemetery to be constructed on Gowanus Heights, a rise east of the similarly named bay that had been the site of the key Battle of Brooklyn during the Revolutionary War. The brainchild of local social leader Henry Pierrepont, Green-Wood Cemetery was one of the first rural cemeteries in America despite its location in the recently incorporated City of Brooklyn. 

The cemetery soon became the final resting place for thousands from burgeoning Brooklyn and beyond; the facility today is a peaceful site for some 570,000 permanent residents. It also grew into one of the nation’s greatest tourist attractions, attracting 500,000 visitors a year by the early 1860s. With its 478 acres of rolling hills, marble monuments, and lush landscaping, Green-Wood Cemetery became a popular escape from the quickly overcrowding city. It was often the only open green space residents could enjoy, creating a demand for more that led to the creation of Central Park, Prospect Park, and other public parks across the nation.

Green-Wood remains an essential institution in the heart of Brooklyn, a site to remember those passed and to be inspired by its magnificent environs. So what’s the connection with Greenwich Village, the East Village, and NoHo? The cemetery’s permanent residents have never been limited to Brooklyn, of course; their number include some of the most prominent residents of our neighborhoods, across two centuries, including Peter Cooper, Samuel F.B. Morse, and Jean-Michel Basquiat.

Peter Cooper

Starting his professional life as a coachmaker’s apprentice with just a single year of formal schooling, Peter Cooper (1791-1883) would eventually leave his mark on the world as a pioneering industrialist and inventor, and his mark on the Village as a great philanthropist.  

His keen insight enabled him to be a true innovator. For example, after discovering a wealth of iron ore in Maryland swampland that he purchased as a real estate investment in 1828, he founded the Canton Iron Works in Baltimore. He then developed the Tom Thumb steam locomotive in 1830, a groundbreaking advance as the first American-built steam locomotive, spurring the success of the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad and funding Cooper’s further investments in real estate and insurance that earned him a fortune.

That wealth enabled Cooper to help those far less fortunate. In 1851, he founded the New York Juvenile Asylum that today serves more than 10,000 children each year. He also served as head of the Public School Society, where he developed the idea of having a free institute in New York that would offer practical education in the mechanical arts and science. In 1853, ground was broken for the Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art.

Cooper’s social views were far ahead of his time. In a time of extreme class, race, and other divisions, classes at Cooper Union were nonsectarian and egalitarian (although 95% of the students were male).  The school’s library remained open until 10 p.m. so working people could access it after work. “The main building of Cooper Union,” the Landmarks Preservatyion Commission wrote in its 1966 designation report for Cooper Union’s Great Hall, a.k.a. the Foundation Building, “is one of those proud buildings on the American Scene which may rightly take its place with the pioneer buildings of all lands. It was here that innovations were made both in the physical structure of the building and in the use for which it was designed — all of them brainchildren of the great philanthropist Peter Cooper.”

Read more about these and Cooper’s other accomplishments, including his 1876 run for president, here.

Samuel F.B. Morse

Another inventor and would-be politician with strong ties to our neighborhoods who can also be found at Green-Wood is Samuel Finley Breese Morse (1791-1872). Morse made his name through telegraph technology and the earliest forms of electronic communication that he helped bring into broad usage in the United States and eventually abroad. 

In 1838 he and his friend Alfred Vail developed the Morse Code, which he would refine into a short signal (the dot) and a long one (the dash) in combinations to spell out messages. He didn’t invent the telegraph, but his key improvements allowed the medium to be deployed on a broader level, transforming communications worldwide. He likely made his first working model by 1835; he made his first public demonstration on January 6, 1838, and publicly demonstrated it again at NYU on January 24, 1838. Morse eventually secured federal funding and in 1844 a patent for his invention. Soon enough, telegraph wires were strung across the nation along the routes of the quickly spreading railroads, providing a nearly-instant means of communication between disparate towns, cities, states and nations for the first time.

Morse was also widely known for his artistic accomplishments, a romantic portraitist who studied abroad and arrived in Greenwich Village in the 1820s, and in 1832 became the first professor of painting in America at New York University, where he lived and painted at 100 Washington Square East. Three years later he acquired studio space for himself and his students in the newly-built neo-Gothic University Building (demolished in 1894 to make way for the present Silver Center). He was involved with all kinds of arts at NYU, including some of the earliest daguerreotypes (an early form of photography) ever taken. Morse also founded and named himself the first president of the National Academy of Design, first located at 663 Broadway near Bleecker Street, followed by locations at the corner of Fourth Avenue and 10th Street, and then at 58 East 13th Street. 

While there was much to admire about his legacy and accomplishments, there was also much to condemn and deplore. During his lifetime, Morse shared and promoted many of the all-too-common nativist and racist sentiments of his time, seeking to become Mayor of New York on anti-immigrant and anti-Roman Catholic platforms in 1836, and arguing in his writings in the 1850s and 1860s for the moral basis for slavery. He was much less successful in politics, however, having received just 1,496 votes in his Mayoral run.

Read more about Morse’s life and legacy here.

Jean-Michel Basquiat

Jean-Michel Basquiat (1960-1988) became in many ways the quintessential late 20th-century downtown artist who created a powerful language of art that continues to impact us today.

His career as a burgeoning artist began in the 1970s while he was a student at City-as-School High School at 16 Clarkson Street in the West Village. His first true hang-out was Washington Square Park, where he met Al Diaz, a graffiti artist and fellow City-as-School student. Through his work with a theater group called Family Life Theatre, Basquiat created a fictional character he called SAMO (Same Old Sh**) who makes a living selling fake religion. Basquiat and Diaz started collaborating on the SAMO project. They began spray-painting graffiti with the SAMO tag on the D train line and all around Lower Manhattan. After a falling out with Diaz, Basquiat began to create paintings on t-shirts, postcards, drawings, and collages, selling them in Washington Square.

In the fall of 1978, Basquiat met fellow downtown artists Keith Haring and Kenny Scharf, both major players in the emerging East Village art scene. They were to remain an integral part of Basquiat’s life and work. In June 1980, Basquiat’s art was publicly exhibited for the first time in the “Times Square Show,” a group exhibition held in a vacant building at 41st Street and Seventh Avenue. Often considered the groundbreaking exhibition that inaugurated new trends in contemporary art, the conjunction of artists on display represented two very distinct subcultures: the downtown avant-garde consisting of new wave and neo-pop, and the uptown avant-garde of rap and graffiti.

Throughout the decade to come, Basquiat’s life and work became almost synonymous with that downtown art world. From 1983 until his death in 1988, he lived and worked at 57 Great Jones Street, a former stable owned by his friend Andy Warhol. (Village Preservation installed a historic plaque honoring his artistry on the site in 2016.)

Inspired by the street art around him, he created some of his most significant works during this period, often referencing issues of class and race. His 1983 painting Defacement (The Death of Michael Stewart) decried the death of artist Michael Stewart, a young Black student at Pratt Institute and graffiti artist, while in police custody after his arrest at the First Avenue and 14th Street L subway station. Basquiat, whose parents hailed from Haiti and Puerto Rico, was also one of the first Black artists to achieve his level of success in the art world; in 2017, his painting Untitled commanded $111 million at auction, the highest ever for an American artist at the time.

Learn more about Basquiat’s life and work on our blog and in this video.