Great planning wnet into layout and design of Woodlawn. Passing through its great entrance into the tree shaded roads is like entering another world - a world of trees, shrubs and flowers and has become a natural bird sanctuary both for migrant birds and for those who make it their permanent home. Woodlawn has had more trees listed in the “Great Tree Search” than any other organization in the metropolitan New York area including the NY Botanical Gardens in the Bronx and in Brooklyn.
The most striking thing to visitors as they walk along these tree shaded paths is the number of famous names on the monuments and mausoleums designed by the greatest architects of the 19th and 20th centuries, including Daniel Chester French who built the Lincoln Memorial in Washington DC. Buried here are Joseph Pulitzer, Herman Melville, Duke Ellington, Miles Davis, Augustus Juilliard, Fiorello LaGuardia, Thomas Nast, George M. Cohan, Irving Berlin, Vernon and Irene Castle, Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Nellie Bly, just to name a few.
We took our friends from Denmark to Woodlawn last week, in honor of the 100th anniversary of the sinking of The Titanic. Many New Yorkers were on that ship and an extraordinary memorial was built to honor them, which actually resembles a rising wave. Opposite this is the tomb of Ida and Isidor Straus, of Abraham and Straus (A&S, a well know New York department store) fame, whose patriarchs and founders perished on the Titanic. Their mausoleum is designed in Egyptian Revival style and features an enormous oceanliner as part of its facade.
Woodlawn has been named as one of the top cultural organizations in NYC because it is a place of beauty - with land set aside as a perpetual memorial to those interred within its boundaries and a park in which outdoor concerts, walking and bike tours and special events take place throughout the year. For me, it’s an outdoor museum, with landscaping and architecture that inspire me to think of the past, the present and the future of human contribution.
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