A few weeks ago I got to talking with a park ranger at one of the Manhattan sites about Cypress Hills National Cemetery. This person is a seasonal who does not live in New York City but is stationed here for the summer and will return to grad school in late August. He wants to make the most of his time here and is taking regular busman’s holidays to see this and that. One place on his list is the national cemetery. I hope he goes. Who knows? Maybe he already has given the level of interest he expressed.

Spread out over parts of Brooklyn and Queens, CHNC is one of the original national cemeteries Lincoln created during the Civil War. A few years back I took the Hayfoot and a friend there on a brutal summer’s day. I am glad we went but in retrospect I saw that, well, maybe it would have been better put of until autumn.

The Daily News sent a crew there over Memorial Day weekend. For me one of the striking things at the cemetery was the rostrum mentioned in the small clip. One sees this at Gettysburg, Antietam, and elsewhere and seeing one here in New York is a strange experience.