Green-Wood Cemetery Gothic gate
— — a brownstone gatehouse with parakeets in the spires.
Not only on a wall.
“Richard Upjohn drew the gate at Green-Wood Cemetery a few years after he finished Trinity Church on Wall Street — the same Gothic Revival hand, this time in brownstone. The spires went up between 1861 and 1865. A colony of monk parakeets, descendants of birds that escaped a Kennedy Airport shipment in the late 1960s, has nested in the finials for over fifty years. Their green flits past the dark stone in every weather.
Green-Wood Cemetery Gothic gate, on ceramic.
Each tile is finished by hand in our Knoxville studio. Artwork is slowly infused into the ceramic surface under high heat and pressure, and rests beneath a thin glossy finish. The colour lives in the surface, not on top of it.
Pick any four 4-inch tiles — National Parks you've been to, a Smokies set, the four seasons of one place. $ for a set of , cork-backed, ready to live on the table.
The place, in three passes.
Green-Wood Cemetery covers 478 acres of glacial moraine in central Brooklyn, founded in 1838 as one of the first rural cemeteries in the United States. By the 1860s it drew half a million visitors a year, second only to Niagara Falls among American tourist destinations — an inspiration that helped lead to the creation of Central Park and Prospect Park. The main entrance stands at 25th Street and Fifth Avenue in Greenwood Heights. The cemetery was designated a National Historic Landmark in 2006 and remains an active burial ground.
The gate was designed by Richard Upjohn and his son Richard Michell Upjohn between 1861 and 1865. The elder Upjohn had finished Trinity Church on Wall Street in 1846; he brought the same Gothic Revival vocabulary to Brooklyn in dark brownstone. The central archway carries terra-cotta reliefs by John Moffitt depicting four scriptural scenes — Come Forth, Weep Not, The Dead Shall Be Raised, and Suffer Little Children. Two spires flank the entrance; a colony of monk parakeets has nested in their stonework since the late 1960s and become the gate's unofficial residents.
The cemetery is open daily from 7:00 a.m. to 7:00 p.m. in summer and closes earlier in winter; admission is free. The R train to 25th Street stops one block from the gate. Maps are available at the visitor's entrance for self-guided walks to the graves of Leonard Bernstein, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Louis Comfort Tiffany, Boss Tweed, and Civil War generals from both sides. The Green-Wood Historic Fund runs trolley tours, concerts in the chapel, and an annual Memorial Day service for the roughly 5,000 veterans buried on the grounds.