Woodlawn Cemetery is an unmissable landmark. Located at the end of the four-train, the Bronx cemetery, which began as a small plot in 1868, has now expanded to 400 acres — half the size of Central Park — with 17 miles of paved, walkable roads.
Even a fresh layer of January snow can’t hide the rolling hills lined with uniform rows of simple headstones or the interspersed ornate memorials, mausoleums, and statues that could be in a museum. In a way, it is a museum — or at least, it’s just as culturally important.
“We are a large, publicly accessible space,” said Meg Ventrudo, executive director of the Woodlawn Conservancy. “Students and graduate students can come and research these notable individuals that are here, and we do tours, so we’re not a museum per se, but people can come on these tours to have a cultural experience. It is more than a notable burial ground, but it is a tourist destination for all of our neighbors to just wander through.”
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Ventrudo and her team have been making the case for Woodlawn as a historically important and culturally relevant destination for years. In addition to being an active burial ground and crematorium, Woodlawn attracts approximately 100,000 visitors from around the world each year.
From newspaper magnate Joseph Pulitzer and investigative reporter Nellie Bly to the ultra-wealthy Astors and women’s rights advocate Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Woodlawn Cemetery is the final resting place of many famous New Yorkers. It was one of the only major non-sectarian cemeteries at the time when mixed-race or interfaith marriages weren’t even allowed.
“Woodlawn never discriminated,” said Ventrudo. “There was no sectioning. There was no African American section, no Jewish section, no Italian section.”
These policies, which continue today, have resulted not only in the largest collection of funerary art in the nation but also in one of the most accurate archives of New York City through major industries and social and cultural movements.
This includes being a popular burial site for prominent Harlem Renaissance figures. Although most visitors know about names like trumpeter and composer Miles Davis (his massive headstone is hard to miss, standing taller than most grown men), vaudeville entertainer and “Queen of Happiness” Florence Mills, or self-made millionaire and arts patron Madam C.J. Walker, lesser-known or completely unknown contributors are there, too.
The latter are the contributors that Ventrudo and her team want to find next in their newest project: Where Harlem Rests. The interactive walking tour of Woodlawn Conservancy, which will include a historical booklet, map, and new exhibition signs, is funded by a $50,000 grant from the African American Cultural Heritage Action Fund.
Last year, Woodlawn Cemetery was one of a handful of sites that received a grant from the Action Fund, which was the National Trust for Historic Preservation’s response to the 2017 protests in Charlottesville, Va., and the subsequent national debates about glorifying and memorializing the Confederacy. Since its creation, the Action Fund has raised $150 million to help preserve 304 historical sites significant to Black culture that would otherwise have been underfunded and overlooked, such as John and Alice Coltrane’s Philadelphia home and Nina Simone’s childhood home in Tryon, N.C.
According to Brent Leggs, executive director of the Action Fund, the preservation movement historically centered on the accomplishments of white men through a Eurocentric historical lens — but that’s changing.
“More recently, the preservation movement has evolved [to] where we are more committed to telling the full history of our nation and increasing diverse representation, beyond architecture, beyond a white male history, into stories that inspire all Americans,” Leggs said.
Although Woodlawn is already a well-known cultural site for notable Black figures, Where Harlem Rests will go beyond that, said Susan Olsen, head historian of the Conservancy.
“I was born here,” she joked. Despite working for the nonprofit for 24 years, she is still discovering the stories and people contributing to local history. The Action Fund grant, she said, will allow them to do the necessary historical digging to piece together a more complete history of the Harlem Renaissance.
Their project was inspired by the work of historian Eric K. Washington, who wrote “Boss of the Grips,” the biography of James H. Williams, the nearly forgotten yet influential chief porter of Grand Central Station. Williams wasn’t a musician or entertainer, but was one of the few Black men with the power to hire, organize, and lead other Black men during the burgeoning travel industry in the early 1900s.
“The fact that [Eric] was able to find all these folks and things … all of a sudden, we realized maybe we should be telling some other stories besides ‘here’s Duke Ellington and here’s Florence Mills’ … we have the Harlem Renaissance greats, but we didn’t know we had the owner of the Marshall Hotel, where all the gathering starts,” said Olsen.
“It’s this very interesting story,” said Ventrudo. “Who were the Black funeral directors? Were there funeral directors? Who were the Black nightclub owners and Black civil service folks? We don’t know, but we’re finding out.”
Washington has been hired as the consulting historian for the Where Harlem Rests tour. With a team of volunteer historians, they scour archives and historical records for other notable figures whose words may not be enshrined in novels or whose music may not have lived on. Washington then verifies all sources. From there, the Conservancy can ideally connect a person with a burial site or even an unmarked grave and add them as an official part of the tour.
“There has been a tremendous amount of work to find people who should be recognized,” said Olsen.
The grant will also allow the Conservancy to partner with Bronx International High School and the city’s Summer Youth Employment Program, where students will learn how to care for the gravesites that will be featured on the tour.