10/26/2026
The layout of your favorite city park wasn’t designed for a park. It was designed for a cemetery.
Here’s how that happened.
By the 1820s, churchyards in cities like Boston and New York were full. They had been taking burials for generations, and doctors worried the crowding itself was spreading disease. The solution was to move burial grounds outside the city and lay them out like gardens — winding paths, trees, ponds, open views. Mount Auburn opened outside Boston in 1831. Brooklyn’s Green-Wood followed in 1838.
What no one planned for was the visitors — and then the crowds of them. These were the only large green spaces near the city, so families began treating them like parks. They came for picnics, for carriage rides, for a quiet afternoon outdoors.
By around 1860, Green-Wood was drawing up to half a million visitors a year — second only to Niagara Falls as a tourist attraction in the entire country. A dedicated ferry brought people in, and carriages ran through the grounds as often as every 15 minutes from May through October.
That popularity didn’t go unnoticed. Andrew Jackson Downing, the most influential landscape writer of his day, looked at those crowds and drew a simple conclusion: if people were flocking to cemeteries just to be outdoors, cities clearly needed real public parks. He argued the case in print for years, pointing to Green-Wood as proof that Americans wanted designed green space.
New York listened. The city set aside the land for Central Park, held a design competition, and in 1857 chose a plan by Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux — and Vaux had been Downing’s own partner. The winding paths, the framed views, the whole idea of a landscape built for everyone to walk through: all of it traces straight back to the garden cemeteries that came first.
Central Park opened in 1858, twenty years after Green-Wood.
A wave followed. The parks built across the country in the decades after borrowed the same principles. So when you’re standing in a city park today, you’re standing inside an idea that began in a cemetery.
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Sources: Mount Auburn Cemetery, Green-Wood Historic Fund, National Park Service.
