Undiscovered New York: Famous city cemeteries

by Jeremy Kressmann on

This week Undiscovered New York is “digging up” a rather morbid topic: the cemeteries. The New York City metropolitan area has a population of around 18 million residents. However this number only reflects those that still have a pulse. When you’re talking about an urban area with history dating back to the 16th Century, we’re talking about millions and millions of lives that came and went within the confines of the city’s boundaries. And they all had to be buried somewhere.

When one thinks of a cemetery, it’s a place that’s frequently associated with stagnation and death. Yet the constant dynamism and momentum of New York does not allow any site to remain at rest. New York’s many cemeteries remain an important part in the city’s constantly changing patchwork and are filled with not only the stories of the past but also of the city’s future and continued vitality.

After the jump Undiscovered New York will take you inside some of the city’s most famous cemeteries. Interested in learning about New York’s role in the invention of baseball? Want to visit the habitat of a flock of tropical birds living in New York City? Would you be curious to know there’s a cemetery smack-dab in the middle of the East Village? Click below to get the whole story…
Green-Wood Cemetery
Arguably one of New York City’s most famous grave sites, Green-Wood Cemetery was founded in 1838 in an area just southwest of the Brooklyn’s Prospect Park. Among those interred at Green-Wood include 1980’s downtown auteur Jean-Michel Basquiat, infamous 1800’s gang leader William “Bill the Butcher” Poole (portrayed by Daniel Day Lewis in Gangs of New York), as well as hundreds of early pioneers of a new 1800’s sport called baseball.

Visitors to Green-Wood will most certainly want to check out the Gothic Revival entrance gate at the cemetery’s entrance on 5th Avenue and 25th Street. In addition to the beautiful design, it’s also the nesting grounds for a flock of monk parakeets from South America that now call the cemetery home. The birds escaped from a container at JFK Airport in the 1960’s and have populated the area ever since.

New York Marble Cemetery
Hidden in the heart of New York’s happening East Village neighborhood, the New York Marble Cemetery and is the oldest non-sectarian cemetery in the city of New York. First established in 1830, the cemetery was founded to deal with recent outbreaks of Yellow Fever. Though the Marble Cemetery houses a few notable New Yorkers, it’s more impressive for its location. Hidden behind a narrow metal gate on Second Avenue, visitors enter a quiet walled sanctuary surrounded on all sides by the bustling urban life of Manhattan. The cemetery is typically open the fourth Sunday of each month, March through November, for those interested in checking it out.

Trinity Church Cemetery
Directly across from Ground Zero lies one of Manhattan’s most famous cemeteries, and the only active grave site within the borough, at Trinity Church. The church’s graveyard at 74 Trinity Place is the final resting place for some of America’s most famous figures, including Alexander Hamilton and New York fur baron John Jacob Astor and steamboat inventor Robert Fulton.

Weird things that drop on New Year’s Eve

by Jamie Rhein on

Jeffery wrote about weird New Year’s traditions around the world. There are also weird items that drop at midnight New Year’s Eve.

Sure you can watch the ball drop at Time’s Square in New York City on New Year’s Eve, either in person or on television, or you can watch a walleye drop. A walleye is a fish caught in Lake Erie. Every year a 20-foot, 600 pound fiberglass walleye is dropped in Port Clinton, Ohio to ring in the New Year.

Port Clinton isn’t the only town to drop unusual items to mark a new beginning. I’ve known about Walleye Madness for year’s but came across this Reuters article with nine other unusual New Year’s drop items. As you will notice, most items are food related. The links lead to articles and references with information about each of these quirky events.

Travel Read: 100 Places Every Woman Should Go

by Brenda Yun on

I never knew there could be a book so thoughtful and inspiring for women as this one. Stephanie Elizondo Griest’s second travel book, which lists far more than just 100 Places Every Woman Should Go, is truly an encyclopedia for women travelers. It’s the kind of book that could never have existed fifty years ago, but is so refreshing that free-spirited, female travelers should feel grateful that it exists now, and fully prepared for that next trip into the wide, wonderful world.

Griest’s great book is packed with helpful historical information, inspiring stories, and travel tips. It’s broken up into nine sections — my favorite being the first: “Powerful Women and Their Places in History.” There’s so much worth digesting in each locale described. For instance, I had no idea that the word “lesbian” came from the birthplace of Sappho (Lesbos, Greece). Griest fills each description with great travel tips that often include specific street addresses for particularly noteworthy sights.What I like most about the 100 places she chooses is that she shies away from identifying places that every woman obviously dreams of traveling to, like Venice, Rome, and Paris. Instead, she paves a new path for women, encouraging us to visit Japan’s 88 sacred temples or stroll through the public squares of Samarkand, one of the world’s oldest cities in Uzbekistan.

Griest does not limit her list to concrete or singular places. Sometimes, she finds a way to take us to virtual spots like the Museum of Menstruation or creates lists like “Best Bungee Jumping Locales,” “Sexiest Lingerie Shops,” or “Places to Pet Fuzzy Animals.” These 100 “places” are really all-encompassing, and Griest manages to take us on an imaginative journey around the world, packing all her feminine know-how into each description.

I did find, occasionally, that there were some places missing from some of the identified places in her list. For instance, I was baffled as to why two Russian writers were on Griest’s list of “Famous Women Writers and Their Creative Nooks,” but Emily Dickinson, Virginia Woolf, and Jane Austen were absent. I was additionally confused that cooking classes in India and Thailand were not on the list of “Culinary Class Destinations.”

Griest’s opinions of places are somewhat biased, too. While she does a fairly good job covering the globe, a single locale in French Polynesia or the South Pacific is missing, and some places like Oaxaca, Angkor Wat, and New York are mentioned several times. Her college town of Austin landed on the list, but places like Budapest and Cairo are never acknowledged.

With every list, however, there is bound to be some bias and some personal flair and choice involved, and Griest’s original and creative sensibilities are still well-worth reading about. The great thing about this book is that you can flip to a place description, be perfectly entertained and inspired, and then tuck the book away until the next time you feel compelled to read about the places you can go. Or, you can read it in one sitting like I did and be completely blown away by the amazing places in this one world that it’s hard to imagine why we live in one city for so long and not just pack our bags and get out there and see some if not all of it.

Click here to read my review of Griest’s first travel book, “Around the Bloc: My Life in Moscow, Beijing, and Havana.” My review of Griest’s third travel book, “Mexican Enough: My Life Between the Borderlines” is forthcoming, along with my interview with the author in early January. Feel free to jot me an email (Brenda DOT Yun AT weblogsinc DOT com) if you have a question for Stephanie.

Click the images to learn about the most unusual museums in the world — featuring everything from funeral customs, to penises, to velvet paintings, to stripping.


Humorous round up of 2008 and 10 Gadling posts connected to this year’s news

by Jamie Rhein on

Here’s a humorous round-up of news stories that made it big in 2008. Uncle Jay, whoever he is, sings a medley of carols with the words changed to offer a unique twist in the explanation of some of this year’s major events. His cast of characters and happenings include Barack Obama, Sarah Palin, gas prices, the economy , the Olympics and more. While watching the video, I thought of Gadling posts that also made reference to the themes of these stories.

Here are 10 Gadling posts by 10 different bloggers that have related to the news. There are scads of other posts. This is merely a sampling.

Through the Gadling Lens: 5 great New Year’s resolutions for amateur travel photographers

by Karen Walrond on

Well, ’tis the season for coming up with New Year’s resolutions — and frankly, I think “lose weight” and “be a better person” are just a bit too cliche, don’t you? Still, it’s good to have goals, and since we’re all about travel and photography up here at Through the Gadling Lens, I thought I’d through a little megapixel inspiration your way, with a few suggestions for improving your travel photography for 2009. The following are resolutions I’ve either made in the past, or are seriously considering making for the coming year — and of course, I’m always looking for additional suggestions, so feel free to leave them in the comments section below.

So, without further ado, five great resolutions:

1. Shoot daily. When I bought my very first single-lens reflex camera back in the mid-nineties, I took a professional photographer-friend with me to make my choice. I remember, after spending $501 on the second-hand Nikon FE-series camera (in my mind, a fortune), I stood there looking at him, the camera in my shaking hands. “Now what?” I said.

“Now, you shoot,” he calmly responded. “And shoot, and shoot, and shoot, and shoot, and shoot.”

“Shouldn’t I take a class first?” I asked.

“You can,” he said, carefully, “but the truth is that the way to become a photographer is to shoot and shoot. And shoot some more. And compare. And contrast. And adjust. You will learn more doing that than from any class you could take.”

Years later, I have to agree: the best way to become a photographer is to be a photographer. So even if you’re not traveling, go ahead and pick up your camera daily, aim it at something, and squeeze the trigger. Take pictures of your breakfast. Your unmade bed. Your partner. Your reflection in a store window. A flower. A blade of grass. Whatever. The point is to train your eye to frame shots naturally, and to hone your own photographic style. Once you do, taking photographs when you are traveling will become a piece of cake.



2. Join a new Flickr Group. Naturally, if you’re a Gadling reader and you take photographs when you travel, you’ve already joined the Gadling Flickr group (you have joined, haven’t you?). But since you’re going to be taking these daily photographs, consider joining other groups for inspiration and encouragement. Want to get better at portraits? There’s a group for that. Landscape photography more your thing? There’s a group for that, too. If you’re planning vacations to the beach for 2009, then maybe this pool will provide some inspiration. The point is, joining a community which challenges you and constructively criticizes your images will only help you enhance your skill. And the best part? It costs you nothing to join.



3. Start a photoblog. Several years ago, I made the “I’m going to take a photograph every day” New Year’s resolution — but knowing that I would be horrible at keeping it, I decided to put a little skin in the game: I started photoblogging. I figured that if I had an audience, then I would be pushed to publish only my really good shots; which, in turn, forced me to be a bit circumspect of the images that I chose to capture daily. Now, obviously, you don’t have to make your photoblog public — you can just as easily make it private and for your eyes only, until you’re brave enough to let the world see your work. Either way, the great upside to doing this is that you will naturally see the progression of your skills over the year, because by sticking to it, you’ll undoubtedly see improvement from the shots you take at the beginning of January 2009 and the ones you take at the end of December 2009. Besides, if you do take your photoblog public and allow people to comment on your images, the encouragement from your audience can be priceless.

If you decide to start a photoblog, here are a couple of tips:

  • There are several blogging platforms out there which will allow you upload your photographs and thus create a photoblog: Blogger is one such platform and Typepad is another; but there are several more (check out WordPress and my personal favourite, Squarespace, to name a few). Some of them have levels which are free, and still others you have to pay a monthly fee (but they often have a free trial period). In general, you don’t have to be a whizbang website developer or coder to use these — if you’re comfortable with using standard word processing software, you should be able to figure out how to use a blogging platform. Just check them out, email some of your favourite bloggers to ask them what they recommend, and just jump in.
  • When it comes to designing your blog, remember, less is more: the point is to focus on your images that you’ll be uploading each day. Therefore, very busy blog designs will compete with your images, and sort of defeat the purpose. A clean design often works best.
  • For inspiration, check out some recent favourite photobloggers from around the globe: Bloom, Grow, Love; Modern Day Gilligan; momster.; One day files.

4. Plan at least one trip specifically for the purpose of practicing your photography. This could be a trip anyplace, anywhere. It could be for three straight weeks, or simply a day trip to a neighbouring town. The point is to force yourself into a change of scenery, and then capture its beauty. It is, of course, more exciting to plan a dream vacation to an exotic locale for an extended period of time, but if you don’t have the time or the money to do so, then by all means, pick a town on a map within a ninety minute drive (or commuter train ride, or whatever), and then research it. Find out what it’s known for, and what makes it special. And then, armed with your research (and keeping in mind the kinds of shots you’d like to take), take off one Saturday, and snap away. It’s great practice for honing your travel photography skills, and who knows — you might create some cool memories while you’re at it.

5. Plan a trip to take an on-location photography workshop. Think of it: you take your long-wished-for trip to the Grand Canyon, in the company of a professional photographer, who not only shows you the best parts of the canyon park to shoot, but also shows you the best light, and how to set your camera to maximize the beauty of the images you take. Or perhaps a photography excursion to the French Wine Country, where you spend your days taking photographs of the amazing countryside under the tutelage of a local photographer, and your evenings sipping the products of the local vineyards.

Photo excursions like these are a mere Google search away, and if you’re willing to spend the cash, they can result in a trip to remember — with the images to prove it. Check out the websites of some of the big-name camera manufacturers to start (right now, this one from Nikon has caught my eye … it’s been way too long since I went scuba diving, man …), and then go from there. The possibilities are too fantastic to contemplate.

So, those suggestions should get you started — no need to do them all, obviously, but if you’d really like to improve your photography skills, considering doing one or two of them. And if you have any other suggestions, please do leave them in the comments section — I’m coming up with my own list as I type.

In the meantime, Happy New Year, everyone. We’ll continue with more travel photography tips and resources in 2009!

Karen is a writer and photographer in Houston, Texas. You can see more of her work at her site, Chookooloonks.
And for more Through the Gadling Lens, click here.