I See Dead People
Happy June. This is the sixth issue of Rabbit Rabbit Rabbit — it’s just like every other newsletter, except it drinks too much.
Maybe this is when things go kaput? It’s been a long month of typing at the day job, and brain cells are depleted. So more pictures, fewer words.
Week-end
Between work and worrying about work, I had one real day off this past holiday weekend. I spent it at a cemetery.
Green-Wood
The Met, way up on the 4/5/6, more than halfway to Yankee Stadium, I’ve been to lots of times. Green-Wood, a National Historic Landmark two miles from my front door, not once in twenty years of living here.
It’s a 185-year-old, 478-acre cemetery, and it’s pretty great.
I’ve always liked cemeteries. Doesn’t everybody? Peaceful, green, and transcendental, or spooky, depending on your mood or time of day.
As a kid, visiting my grandparents’ graves with my family, my favorite part was at the end of the visit when my mom would let my brother and me roll down the steep lawns of Rose Hills — our arms up against our chests, our bodies as straight as can be, flinging them to the ground and rolling over and over like a log down vast, freshly cut slopes of well-manicured grass.
It was probably not the most respectful thing to do at a cemetery (we’d try to avoid tumbling over the flat gravestones as much as possible), but it was as close to sledding as we could get in Alhambra, Calif. A wholesome good time, I think.
(All I did at Green-Wood was walk around and take pictures. No tumbling over graves.)
Along with being a cemetery, Green-Wood is also an arboretum and a destination for birders. Here are two birds. They are fast.
And here is another. This one is black. Or maybe dark blue. (I am not a birder.)
I don’t know who Thomas Gallagher is, or why he needed such a tall spire and a fancy gate.
This bronze dog (one of a pair flanking the entrance to a tomb) has his own stick.
Dapper.
Another thing Green-Wood is, is one of the major sites of the Battle of Long Island, which is what the monument above is commemorating.
Also known as the Battle of Brooklyn, the battle took place on August 27, 1776, was the first major battle following the signing of the Declaration of Independence, and was also the largest battle of the war.
In the early morning, a small contingent of American troops took this hill — now known as Battle Hill — from a much larger British force and held them off for a while in heroic, desperate, and ultimately futile fashion. (Spoiler alert: they eventually lost the hill, and this first battle was also our first defeat.) I feel like it sounds like I’m making all this up, but it’s what was written on the plaques.
I don’t know why I find this all so surprising. But it’s wild for me to imagine Revolutionary War soldiers marching up Fifth Ave. then retreating from Sunset Park to Brooklyn Heights and Fort Greene — even though it’s literally called Fort Greene. This spot is 2.2 miles from my house. I took the subway here. I don’t know, maybe it’s simple lack of imagination on my part or maybe it’s because, even though I’m pretty sure I scored a 4 on the AP US History exam in high school, I suck at history.
Anyway, here are some more dead people. And, oh hey, look, it’s Manhattan, too.
Another plaque explained how the rocky terrain of Green-Wood is moraine, or glacial till — the stuff left in the wake of a receding glacier. (The same 10,000-year-old glacial forces that Robert Caro describes as inspiring Robert Moses.)
New York’s early planners deemed this glacial detritus good land for parks, but not good for streets and buildings. So if you take a birds-eye view of Brooklyn, you’ll see that the city’s major parks and green stretches describe the path of a retreating glacier (in addition to the ghosts of retreating soldiers).
Ebbets patch.
Offerings in front of the grave of Henry Chadwick (1824–1908), noted in the guide map as “baseball pioneer, inventor of the box score, author of first rulebook.”
The only Max Ophüls movie I’ve seen was his last, a somewhat trippy stunner called Lola Montés. This is that Lola!
Some of the other VIPs among Green-Wood’s “570,000 permanent residents”: Louis Comfort Tiffany (1848–1933), Leonard Bernstein (1918–1990), William “Boss” Tweed (1823–1878), Samuel F.B. Morse (1791–1872), Jean-Michel Basquiat (1960–1988). A pretty good collection of bones.
The guide map also lists Margaret Pine (1778–1857) in its History Walk, with this short description:
Born into slavery in Brooklyn, Pine became free by 1827 when slavery legally end in New York. She is interred in the lot of the Van Zandt family, who enslaved her.
Spent a while looking, but couldn’t find her grave, and eventually gave up. Next time.
Don’t go into the light (without finishing your beer).
Other rabbit holes
Ted Lasso redux. I previously said that Ted Lasso had become too cringey to bear and I’d stopped watching after the second episode of season three. But the hype for the series finale may bring back in. Dammit.
Maximum suck. Discovery bought Warner, which owned HBO, and HBO Max became Max (which is like renaming Disney+ to “Plus”), and the app got sucky, with its crappy non-native player and lack of frame-rate matching. Plus, now’s there is a bunch of Discovery content junking up the place — bad reality shows, where the “Battle of Long Island” is two people fighting over a parking space in a Target parking lot. Why are so many bozos in charge of things? It pains me to think that these people are now the stewards of the Warner Bros. film archive.
The Sox. This year’s Boston base-ball club is more fun to watch than I expected. But despite playing better than .500 ball and a brief stint in third place in the division, they ended May like they ended April: last in the AL East, currently 10.5 games behind the Rays. It’s getting late early.
OK, that’s it for this little field trip. (Farther adventures ahead.) Have a good month.