Founded in 1863 and designated a National Historic Landmark in 2011, Woodlawn's 400 acres hold more than 300,000 graves, including jazz greats Duke Ellington and Miles Davis alongside Herman Melville.
The grounds are vast and the famous graves widely scattered, so pick up or download a map and plan a route — and remember it remains an active cemetery, so visit respectfully.
Woodlawn opened in 1863 on farmland then still in Westchester County, laid out by James C. Sidney as a rural cemetery: curving drives routed around trees already standing, sightlines held open to a lake, burial arranged as landscape. In 1867 the trustees changed course and adopted the landscape lawn plan that Adolph Strauch had introduced at Spring Grove in Cincinnati — no fences, no hedges, markers kept low, the ground reading as one continuous sweep of grass. Both design eras are still legible as you walk between sections.
The result is an open-air catalog of American funerary architecture: roughly 1,300 mausoleums, among them work by McKim, Mead and White, Carrère and Hastings, John Russell Pope, Cass Gilbert, James Gamble Rogers and Sir Edwin Lutyens, with planting by Beatrix Farrand. F. W. Woolworth's own tomb is an Egyptian Revival temple: sphinxes flanking the entrance steps, columns with palm capitals, and a winged solar disc carved above the door — funerary Egypt imported wholesale to the Bronx.
The thing most visitors walk straight past is the glass. Most of those mausoleums keep their original stained-glass windows, spanning roughly the late 1870s to the late 1920s, and more than fifty are by Tiffany Studios — described as the largest single concentration of Tiffany windows anywhere. They were made to be read from within a small dark room, so from the drive you catch them only when the sun sits behind the building and the door grille lets you look in.
Woodlawn was designated a National Historic Landmark in 2011 and remains an active cemetery, with more than 300,000 burials across some 400 acres. Duke Ellington, Miles Davis, Celia Cruz and Irving Berlin are here, along with Charles Evans Hughes, F. W. Woolworth and Rowland H. Macy. Herman Melville's stone is carved with an unfurled scroll left deliberately blank.
Webster Ave & E 233rd St, Bronx, NY 10470 · Official site ↗
Woodlawn Cemetery is one of the largest cemeteries in New York City and a designated National Historic Landmark. Located south of Woodlawn Heights, Bronx, it has the character of a rural cemetery. It is notable in part as the final resting place of some well-known figures.
This background summary is from Wikipedia, used under CC BY-SA 4.0. The editorial on this page is ours.