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- New York Times
The Man Who Made a Brooklyn Cemetery the Place to Be
Do you remember Roy Smeck, guitarist and banjo legend from the 1930s?
'We have him here,' said Richard J. Moylan the other day, in a cluttered office that looked about three weeks from moving-out day.
It is a phrase Mr. Moylan — 70, with a robust head of white hair and a pleasantly chatty manner — uses often, or did until recently. Last Friday, he retired from Green-Wood Cemetery in Brooklyn, where he had worked for the last 53 years, first as a lawn cutter and since 1986 as president, and thus de facto mayor to the grounds' 570,000 permanent residents.
Around the office were a half-dozen Roy Smeck signature guitars that Mr. Moylan had collected for the cemetery, along with books, CDs and artwork associated with other people interred there.
'We have Leonard Bernstein,' he said. Also F.A.O. Schwartz (toys), Eberhard Faber (pencils) and Samuel Morse (code). But of the filmmaker Jonas Mekas, who was cremated at the cemetery in 2019, Mr. Moylan lamented, 'I don't think we have him.'
(It is a sore spot with Mr. Moylan that so many families choose to scatter their loved ones' remains rather than entomb at least some of them at Green-Wood, where future generations might gather to visit them.)
Green-Wood, which sits on 478 rolling, tree-filled acres in a semi-industrial neighborhood that real estate agents call Greenwood Heights, occupies a distinctive place in New York City and in the development of American cemeteries. First opened in 1838, it was in the 19th century the second-most-popular attraction in the state, after Niagara Falls, and inspired the competition to design Central Park and Prospect Park.
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