He made Green-Wood Cemetery a destination for the living

Boston Globe

10 hours ago

Around the office were a half-dozen Smeck signature guitars that Moylan had collected for the cemetery, along with books, CDs and artwork associated with other people interred there.
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'We have Leonard Bernstein,' he said. Also F.A.O. Schwarz (toys), Eberhard Faber (pencils) and Samuel Morse (code). But of filmmaker Jonas Mekas, who was cremated at the cemetery in 2019, Moylan lamented, 'I don't think we have him.'
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(It is a sore spot with Moylan that so many families choose to scatter their loved ones' remains rather than entomb at least some of them at Green-Wood, where future generations might gather to visit them.)
Green-Wood, which sits on 478 rolling, tree-filled acres in a semi-industrial neighborhood that real estate agents call Greenwood Heights, occupies a distinctive place in New York City and in the development of American cemeteries. First opened in 1838, it was in the 19th century the second-most-popular attraction in the state, after Niagara Falls, and inspired the competition to design Central Park and Prospect Park.
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Moylan, who started working at the cemetery during law school and never left, has the rare distinction of taking over an established institution and utterly transforming it, turning it into a National Historic Landmark with 450,000 annual visitors.
On a garishly perfect June afternoon, the cemetery's towering neo-Gothic arch entryway, home to a group of noisy monk parakeets, welcomed a few dozen visitors to the grounds. (All proceeded on foot; the cemetery does not allow bicycles, scooters or roller skates.)
A couple of trolleys, used for weekend guided tours, sat idle on one of the extensive, labyrinthine paths. Smoke from an earlier ceremony wafted from a large dish by a koi pond in an area known as the Tranquility Garden. The garden and smoke reflect the changing neighborhood around Green-Wood, which has become heavily Asian American.
When Moylan took over Green-Wood in 1986, the cemetery was closed to tourists or people drawn to the open space. Visitors had to tell guards at the gate which grave they intended to visit.
'That was when people were breaking in and stealing stained-glass windows and stealing bronze bars and doors off mausoleums,' Moylan said. Even so, he allowed, the tight security was choking off the life of the institution.
'I mean, Ken Jackson from Columbia, he was turned away,' Moylan said, referring to the Bancroft Prize-winning historian and author of 'Silent Cities: The Evolution of the American Cemetery.' If people tried to take photos within the cemetery, guards would rip the film out of their cameras.
Then, around 1999, Moylan was attending a cremation convention in Baltimore (as one does) and decided to visit a nearby cemetery where John Wilkes Booth is buried, among other historical figures. 'And on this Saturday afternoon, there was no one in the place -- no one,' Moylan said. 'And I thought: This can't happen in Brooklyn. We can't have 478 acres of land, and we're basically not allowing people to enjoy it.'
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Moylan started to court visitors, in part for financial reasons -- as more people choose cremation over more remunerative burials, cemeteries have fallen on hard times. Opening the gates gives people more opportunities to consider spending eternity there. Current plot prices start around $22,000.
Over the years, Moylan added green burials and was persuaded to allow the grass to grow wild in one area to attract pollinators, a practice that has upset some families whose relatives are buried there. The cemetery created an artist-in-residence program and commissioned new sculptures, including an obelisk by French conceptual artist Sophie Calle, with a slot into which visitors are invited to slip notes describing their secrets.
Work is now finishing on a $34 million welcome center and gallery in a restored 1895 greenhouse across the street. Money came from the city and state, recognizing Green-Wood as a cultural institution, not just a place where people are buried. Moylan had hoped the welcome center would open before his retirement, but he has left it to his successor, Meera Joshi, a former deputy mayor who resigned earlier this year when the Trump administration moved to drop corruption charges against Mayor Eric Adams, in apparent exchange for his help with the president's deportation agenda.
It makes sense for someone who has spent his life in a cemetery to develop a particular relationship with death. Moylan, who is divorced and has no children, does not have a will -- despite a quadruple-bypass operation in 2020 -- and does not much care whether he will be buried or cremated. 'I'm not a big believer in an afterlife, so I don't think it'll really matter very much,' he said.
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He said he likes to visit the graves of his parents and writer Pete Hamill, who bought a plot near that of Boss Tweed, a 19th century Tammany Hall power broker and scofflaw. 'If you're going to spend an eternity,' Hamill once said, 'better with a rogue than with a saint who would drive you into slumber.'
As for Moylan's next chapter, he hopes to travel to some of the world's great cemeteries that he has not visited, and to brush up on his guitar skills, which he had once hoped would lead him to Roy Smeckian glory. He kept one of the Smeck guitars, a Gibson he had bought himself; the remainder, along with all the art, is now Joshi's domain.
Beyond that, there is a planned move to Staten Island, followed, eventually, by a return to Green-Wood, with or without the possibility of an afterlife. 'Ultimately,' he said, 'I will be with Mom and Dad.'
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