Woodlawn Cemetery

My urban adventure this weekend was to historic Woodlawn Cemetery in the Bronx, which is reached by taking the No.4 Lexington Avenue train to the last stop. You can read my detailed review of Woodlawn on YELP; it is currently their lead review dated 7/29/2012. Suffice it to say this was a cemetery to die for: the stone mausoleums of the very rich interred here are huge and magnificent, with bronze doors sometimes accompanied by statuary and Tiffany stained glass. My wife and I spent hours hiking around the vast acreage, which is filled with manicured lawns and mature foliage. It's very quiet, peaceful and deserted except for a few guards.

As we wandered around, I couldn't help thinking that if only these people were alive today, they would constitute Mitt Romney's natural constituency. Mitt's ideas about cutting taxes even further for the wealthiest and reducing benefits for everyone else at a time of need would, I suspect, make perfect sense to many of them. Maybe he could stage a fundraiser on the grounds of Woodlawn, and the descendants of these moguls from the Gilded Age and later could come and make large contributions to his campaign in memory of their deceased benefactors. If only the GOP could somehow get special "proxy" voting approved for some of these 300,000 deceased elite, Mitt might even have a chance of carrying normally Democratic Bronx County in the election. Perhaps the conservative justices on the Supreme Court could devine an original intent by the framers of the Constitution for this to happen.

I would be remiss if I failed to mention some of the many distinguished Americans buried at Woodlawn, whose fame and contributions to our country transcend partisan politics. A partial list would include musicians Irving Berlin, George M. Cohan, Miles Davis, Duke Ellington, Victor Herbert, and Augustus Juilliard; merchants F.W. Woolworth, J.C. Penney, Roland Macy and the Strauss Family; political leaders Fiorello LaGuardia, Charles Evans Hughes, and Robert Moses; writer Herman Melville; and publisher Joseph Pulitzer. A free map and complete listing of famous people buried at Woodlawn is available to all visitors at the entrances.

The next stop on our hike was the New York Botanical Gardens, located about two miles away. We decided to walk there after fortifying ourselves by a brief stop at Dunkin Donuts across the street to buy cold drinks and a small bag of munchkin donuts for a sugar boost. More than half of the distance was a single side of the multi-sided cemetery, which will give you some idea of the vast size of Woodlawn.

On arrival at the Botanic, where we are members, we headed straight to the "forest" area, which gives you the feeling of being in the woods in upstate New York rather than in part of a crowded city with over 8 million inhabitants. Running through these grounds is the Bronx River, the only natural river still running through New York City.