Cemeteries, to most of us, are no place for the living. Cities of the dead, emporia of the departed, they’re where we go for funerals—or maybe to seek macabre thrills or conduct business best done in private. That’s certainly how many Brooklyn residents have long viewed the 478 verdant acres of the borough’s largest graveyard, the Green-Wood Cemetery: a place for odd visitors seeking the graves of Leonard Bernstein or Jean-Michel Basquiat. But a recent surge of cultural programming in Green-Wood—of which Graveyard Shift, a series of public performances launched with Pioneer Works in 2019, is a part—recalls when the cemetery meant something more.

On a typical summer’s day in 1850, decades before Prospect Park opened, Green-Wood would feel every bit as bustling as the city’s flagship green spaces do today. Visitors would stroll along winding pathways, or take joyrides on horse-drawn carriages through the wider roads. A few would be dressed in traditional all-black Victorian mourning attire, paying respects to recently buried loved ones; some would enjoy leisure time by paddling around a pond in rowboats. Green-Wood was so popular, in fact, that the cemetery published maps guiding people to points of interest, like its architecturally spectacular monuments, including the French Gothic revivalist tomb of martyred debutante Charlotte Canda. Early etchings of Green-Wood landscapes depicted these cemetery-goers exploring the space. Later on, their activities would also be captured in stereograph photography.

In the mid-nineteenth century, cemeteries like Green-Wood were much more than burial sites; they offered tranquil time away from the noisy streets of fast-growing cities. Prior to the 1830s, urban cemeteries across America were built into the courtyards of churches. But the Industrial Revolution transformed empty public space into factories and warehouses. Roadways and bridges proliferated. Towns morphed into dense urban centers and land was bought, zoned, and redeveloped. As they did, churchyards exhumed the bodies buried beneath them to address concerns over public health (at the time, people believed that even long-dead corpses could contaminate a city’s water supply) and to free up land. After exhumation, decedents were moved outside of the city to what became known as "rural cemeteries."

The first of these was established in Cambridge, Massachusetts, a town outside of, but not far from, the burgeoning city of Boston. Cambridge’s Mount Auburn Cemetery opened in 1831, and it wasn’t long before most major American cities had one (or several) cemeteries sprawling out over rolling hills just beyond their edges. It was Mount Auburn that inspired the founding and design of Brooklyn's Green-Wood, which was incorporated in 1838 in a region of King’s County that was still pastoral and undeveloped. At Green-Wood, meandering pathways were intentionally designed to feel labyrinthine: turning the visitor into a wanderer, it was felt, facilitated better contemplation of death. (The pathways were never too winding, though—here, as in most graveyards, the paths are designed to lead you back to the main gate.) It was designed, at a time of radical change in the built environment, to glorify the natural world and return city-dwellers to nature. Ponds offered tranquil beauty and fun outings in rowboats; these ponds were also prime real estate for wealthy patrons who planned future interments by their shores. (Though cemeteries were open to all as public places, class disparity meant that only the wealthy could afford to be buried inside rural cemeteries. Potters’ fields—graveyards with modest headstones and little to no maintenance—were designated burial grounds for the lower classes; some of them, like Washington Square Park in Manhattan, were turned into public squares.)

Rural cemeteries were built for utilitarian ends, but became cherished social spaces which inspired our grandest public parks: when Manhattan’s Central Park opened in 1858, its famous designers cited Green-Wood as a principal influence. In fact, the layout of parks like the National Mall, Lincoln Park in Chicago, and Griffith Park in Los Angeles—and the very concept of outdoor public space with greenery split up by winding paved roads—were all inspired by cemeteries. The peaceful, leafy landscapes that allowed urbanites to reconnect with nature were not prioritized by city planners until after the need for rural cemeteries emerged. The proliferation of parks and urban green space in the late 1800s helped pull many people away from graveyards—a harbinger of a larger cultural shift which unfolded across the 20th century and which opened a vast gulf between the world of the living and the places and rites reserved for the dead.

In recent years, though, that gulf has begun to close thanks to cemetery directors like Green-Wood’s president, Richard Moylan. Since the 1990s, when Green-Wood’s space for new burials began to grow scarce, Moylan has led a push toward using the cemetery for activities other than funerals. Green-Wood has begun to take up its previous role as a community and social space, with exhibitions, lectures, end-of-life literacy programs, and festivals that offer people ways to reconnect with their mortality in a gentle, beautiful, and not-so-intimidating way. The Graveyard Shift series that I helped launch in 2019 grew from these same efforts. Graveyard Shift—which since then has included four performances—has sought to question conventional attitudes toward death by bringing people to Green-Wood for artistic experiences which, I hoped, might help people confront our culture’s widespread wariness of death and dying. It has long been clear to me that if people could simply spend time amongst gravestones and mausoleums, that would improve how we relate to our mortality. This is a pretty common idea among death educators and end-of-life literacy experts, but perhaps less so for an arts worker. But I launched Graveyard Shift with the conviction that better relationships to death can be fostered through larger cultural changes as well as in modern funerary practices. Artists have the unique ability to address difficult topics with beauty and candor, and so are singularly suited to help shift the current attitude toward death and dying.

Neither of the two artists who performed at the first Graveyard Shift, musician Yonatan Gat and multi-media visual artist Kim Brandt, were discouraged or confused by the request to make work for a cemetery. They embraced the backdrop and intuitively understood the profound nature of the commission. Any kind of performance art is inherently ritualized work, and the cemetery is already a particularly charged space. This is why these performances have worked—and especially so when the artists have responded to the space in unique ways. When, in 2019, Yonatan Gat shared our stage at Green-Wood with the Medicine Singers (formerly the Eastern Medicine Singers)—an Algonquin Drum Group from Rhode Island—the group performed music they’d never sung in public: ceremonially specific songs for funerary and memorial rituals, meant only to be sung for the dead and in a place occupied by the dead.

Yonatan Gat and the Eastern Medicine Singers perform at Graveyard Shift in the Green-Wood Cemetery, 2019.Photo: Walter Wlodarczyk.

More than one hundred years after the industrialization of death in the West, Americans have never been further from their own mortality. But the imaginative recasting of cemeteries as public spaces can help move the culture back toward a more embodied and mindful relationship with death. Like Green-Wood, Hollywood Forever Cemetery in Los Angeles is now popularly known for strange and glamorous events (such as ritual memorial parties at Valentino’s grave on the anniversary of his death) as well as a place for concerts, film screenings, and literary talks. Similar developments are happening by gravesites across the country. And as they do, communities with strong roots in traditional cultural practices have also continued to carve their rituals around interacting with the beloved dead into modern American cemeteries. In Green-Wood, for example, there are columbaria (buildings that house cremated remains) that are occupied mostly by Asian Americans. Their families tend to the memorial sites and gather on a regular basis to venerate their ancestors as they always have. In places with large Mexican American populations, cemeteries are frequently packed on weekends with picnickers sharing meals amongst the graves—most especially during the month of November, with its lively celebration of Día de los Muertos.

The human need for a relationship to death is deep, stretching back further than the built world. As we continue to reckon with what cemeteries once were, what they are today, and what they could be, old rituals will continue and new ones will emerge, and as our relationship to death and dying improves, a new cycle of harmonious living will unfold. ♦