So you think graveyards aren’t good places to visit? You’ll be there soon enough, you say. Here are 13 great reasons to change your mind. Final resting places come in all shapes and sizes. Some are small and intimate, others go on for hundreds of acres. Military cemeteries teach us that sacrifice outranks everything else. Colonial-era graveyards, with their tombstones angled like old teeth, convey a sense of history, and celebrity-packed graveyards suggest that maybe fame does outlast death. From Sleepy Hollow in upstate New York to Marilyn Monroe’s tomb in Los Angeles, here are cemeteries fit for strolling, education, reflection, and maybe even some black-humored fun.
Douglas Keister / Corbis
Green-Wood Cemetery
Brooklyn, New York
The Cadillac of cemeteries, its several hundred acres boast luscious landscaping (the cherry blossoms in the spring are, pardon us, to die for), a high celebrity count (Horace Greeley, Margaret Sanger, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Leonard Bernstein), plenty of tombstone sculptures and extravagant mausoleums—and maybe the only mausoleums anywhere with lakeside views.
Woodlawn Cemetery
Bronx, New York
Every inch the equal of the more famous Green-Wood when it comes to celebrities (Miles Davis, Herman Melville, Bat Masterson) and mausoleums the size of two- and three-story houses (if houses were designed to look like Egyptian tombs). Don’t miss the street where the department-store magnates (Macy, Penney, and more) are all lined up in their own extravagant neighborhood.
Mt. Auburn
Cambridge, Mass.
The rural cemetery movement—the idea that graveyards need not be crumbling adjuncts to old churches but could be inviting parks that encouraged visitation and contemplation—began with the creation of Mt. Auburn in 1831 (shown here in 1914). Its beautiful landscaping and majestic tombs and mausoleums formed the template for cemeteries large and small across the nation—and for the nation’s municipal parks: Frederick Law Olmsted drew extensively on Mt. Auburn’s layout when he designed Central Park, the granddaddy of nearly all city parks.
Sleepy Hollow, New York
There are a few colonial graveyards in America older than this one (Nantucket, St. Augustine), but the 17th-century graves here have a special cachet: Washington Irving took the names for several characters for The Legend of Sleepy Hollow from the headstones that still mark the graves of the old Dutch families interred here. And yes, the bridge where the Headless Horseman confronted Ichabod Crane is only a few steps away (it's a new bridge, but here as in all things concerning real estate, location is everything). Walk north out of the churchyard and you'll find yourself in the much larger Sleepy Hollow Cemetery, itself a tour of American history and the burial site of Irving himself.
St. Louis #1
New Orleans
Cemeteries are often characterized as cities of the dead, and nowhere is this more literal than the graveyards of New Orleans, where the high water table makes underground burial all but impossible. The above-ground tombs and mausoleums of this cemetery near the French Quarter create a maze of small streets and lanes through which visitors must thread—and which, given the fondness of muggers for this site, you are wise to walk in the company of a tour guide from the U.S. Park Service, which oversees the cemetery. Bonus tomb: the voodoo queen Marie Laveau is supposedly buried here.
Graceland
Chicago
Chicago is the one major American city that has always done well by architects, and architects have repaid that generosity by gracing the city with striking buildings for more than a century. That includes the city’s cemeteries. Louis Sullivan’s tomb for lumber merchant Henry Harrison Getty and his family is one of the most stunning structures anywhere in Chicago. Sullivan himself is also buried in Graceland, as is Ludwig Mies Van Der Rohe (beneath an appropriately modernist tombstone). In a bit of class warfare extending beyond the grave, Graceland and other cemeteries refused the bodies of conspirators convicted (and later pardoned) in the Haymarket Riots of 1886; they are buried in Forest Home/German Waldheim Cemetery in nearby Forest Park, along with Emma Goldman, Billy Sunday, and Ernest Hemingway’s parents.
Shearith Israel Cemetery
Manhattan
Congregation Shearith Israel, a Spanish and Portuguese synagogue established in 1654, was on the move a lot in the early days of New York City, and the congregation’s burial sites mark their progress. Their oldest extant cemetery—the oldest Jewish graveyard in North America—can still be visited in lower Manhattan. Located north of Chatham Square in what is now Chinatown, it includes the graves of 22 veterans of the American Revolution and the grave of the first American-born rabbi. Shearith Israel has had three subsequent cemeteries—two more in Manhattan and the latest in Queens.
Hollywood Forever
Hollywood
It sprawls in the shadow of Paramount Studios’ back lot and serves as the final resting place for numerous Hollywood icons (Cecil B. DeMille, Carl “Alfalfa” Switzer, Fay Wray, Terry [“Toto”], and both Dee Dee and Johnny Ramone). It also boasts a sizable Russian population, reflecting the influx of Russian immigrants in Los Angeles in recent decades. Best tombstone—maybe best tombstone ever: Mel Blanc, the man of 1,000 voices on Looney Tunes cartoons, whose signoff is carved on his stone: “That’s All Folks.”
Westwood Village Memorial Park
Los Angeles
Located near UCLA, this small, intimate cemetery probably possesses more celebrities per square foot than any other burial spot in the country, starting of course with Marilyn Monroe. Keeping her company are Truman Capote, Burt Lancaster, Natalie Wood, Roy Orbison, George C. Scott, Peggy Lee, Frank Zappa, and mostly recently, Ray Bradbury.
Las Cruces
Taos, New Mexico
A small cemetery at the end of Penitente Lane on the edge of Taos, Las Cruces dates back to at least the early part of the 20th century, and it is representative of the life-in-death and death-in-life beliefs that permeate Latino culture, most famously demonstrated in Mexico’s Dia de los Muertos celebrations that feature everything from candy skulls to visits and parties at the tombs and gravesites of loved ones. The graves in this modest country graveyard are often wildly decorated with flowers, toys, wind chimes, and the photographs of grandchildren. The grave markers are a mixture of stone and lovingly carved wood.
Bonaventure
Savannah, Georgia
Take old grave markers, some of them more than 200 years old, add statues of weeping angels, place it all under a thick canopy of live oaks dripping with Spanish moss where the light at noon is as feeble as twilight, and you get perhaps the spookiest—certainly the gloomiest—looking graveyard in the United States. Add to that the fact that the farther back in the cemetery you walk, the older the graves—it’s like walking through time. And then you come to an open marsh under clear skies and a bench to sit on while you contemplate eternity. The bench is a gravestone, too, by the way, marking the burial site of the poet Conrad Aiken. Another bright spot: the grave of lyricist Johnny Mercer, inscribed with his words, “And the Angels Sing.”
God’s Acre
Winston-Salem, North Carolina
A pacifist Protestant sect that settled first in Pennsylvania and then around what is now Winston-Salem, N.C. in the 18th century, the Moravians preached and practiced an extraordinary egalitarianism. Their expansive cemetery in historically restored Old Salem is filled with simple flat white grave markers flowing over a sloping landscape where a brass band announces Christ’s resurrection at dawn every Easter Sunday.
Arlington National Cemetery
Arlington, Virginia
Built on the site of Robert E. Lee’s family home, the nation’s premier military cemetery is a model of physical democracy: the plain marble markers in close formation bestow a symbolic democracy upon all who rest here, recalling the poet AllenTate’s lines, “Row after row with strict impunity / The headstones yield their names to the element.”
