Brooklyn’s Green-Wood Cemetery Brings History to Life

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Photo by Maike Schulz

A Night at Niblo’s Garden, an annual highlight of Green-Wood’s unconventional programming, features circus acts and readings that evoke the spirit of a Victorian-era New York impresario who held similar entertainments at his wife’s mausoleum.

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Photo by Maike Schulz

A Night at Niblo’s Garden, an annual highlight of Green-Wood’s unconventional programming, features circus acts and readings that evoke the spirit of a Victorian-era New York impresario who held similar entertainments at his wife’s mausoleum.

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Photo by Hunter Canning

A Night at Niblo’s Garden, an annual highlight of Green-Wood’s unconventional programming, features circus acts and readings that evoke the spirit of a Victorian-era New York impresario who held similar entertainments at his wife’s mausoleum.

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Photo by Maike Schulz

A Night at Niblo’s Garden, an annual highlight of Green-Wood’s unconventional programming, features circus acts and readings that evoke the spirit of a Victorian-era New York impresario who held similar entertainments at his wife’s mausoleum.

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Photo by Maike Schulz

A Night at Niblo’s Garden, an annual highlight of Green-Wood’s unconventional programming, features circus acts and readings that evoke the spirit of a Victorian-era New York impresario who held similar entertainments at his wife’s mausoleum.

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Photo by Maike Schulz

A Night at Niblo’s Garden, an annual highlight of Green-Wood’s unconventional programming, features circus acts and readings that evoke the spirit of a Victorian-era New York impresario who held similar entertainments at his wife’s mausoleum.

Once a year, among the mausoleums and headstones, fire eaters and flute players mingle with visitors at Brooklyn’s Green-Wood Cemetery.

“It’s unusual,” says Lisa Alpert, vice president for development and programming at Green-Wood. “For most people, it is really unconventional and unexpected that you’re doing public programming in a cemetery.”

While many cemeteries lie dormant, Green-Wood has long been a public park and tourist destination as well as a burial ground. Founded in 1838, it’s given public tours since the 1990s. Today, the national historic landmark hosts more than 200 public programs a year, including cider tastings with apples from its own orchard, bird-watching tours, and re-enactments of the Battle of Brooklyn, fought right on its grounds in 1776.

Those fire eaters and flute players are part of the popular Night at Niblo’s Garden event. The festival features performances by the Bindlestiff Family Cirkus and historic readings meant to invoke the time of William Niblo, a quirky 19th-century New York theater owner. After his wife’s death, Niblo would entertain friends at her mausoleum, which overlooks a pond inside the nearly 500-acre cemetery.

Visitors who take part in the fete, now in its sixth year, recreate Niblo’s picnics with quail eggs, popular in Victorian times, and modern fare such as potato salad.

With more than 280,000 visitors last year, Green-Wood hopes to redefine what a cemetery can be, Alpert says. “We get phone calls from other cemeteries all around the country who are really intrigued with what we’re doing. Because any cemetery has this essential dilemma, which is that it will eventually run out of room to bury the dead.”

While Green-Wood still functions as a cemetery and crematorium, it’s also focused on increasing its membership.

“We believe that once people come here and see how amazing it is, they will come back,” Alpert says. “The last thing we want is for Green-Wood to be empty.”