The New Yorker:

Cemetery—the final resting place of Leonard Bernstein and half a million others—explores a cutting-edge method of processing human remains: electric cremation.

By Eric Lach 

Long before Richard J. Moylan became the president of Brooklyn’s Green-Wood Cemetery, his job was to help with the landscaping. “I started cutting grass here in ’72,” he told me, as he showed me around the grounds, which span four hundred and seventy urban acres. Moylan’s father and grandfather were both contractors at Green-Wood, too. “He’s here,” Moylan said, of his father, who died in 1982 and was buried at the cemetery, four years before Moylan became president. “Originally, I had picked a grave for him up by the Prospect Park West entrance. But the superintendent at the time, who I used to fight with terribly, came to me and said, ‘Rich, you don’t want to bury your dad there. Let me find you a nice spot.’ He found a beautiful spot, on a hill.”

Founded in 1838, Green-Wood is the largest and most famous cemetery in Brooklyn. In addition to Moylan’s father, its residents include Boss Tweed, Samuel Morse, Leonard Bernstein, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Pop Smoke, and more than half a million others. Perched atop the highest natural point in the borough, many of the cemetery’s best spots—including Moylan’s office, in the main administrative building—have a clear view of New York Harbor to the west. Moylan remembers what Green-Wood was like forty or fifty years ago: the staff would knock off at 2 p.m. to drink among the graves, and the administration worked out of offices in Manhattan. “We didn’t want people to come in here. We turned people away,” he said. “We had to change. We couldn’t be the sleepy hidden place that we were for so many years.”

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