A friend and I visited Woodlawn Cemetery in the Bronx a week ago today. We had a map with us but decided instead to meander without purpose and take in what we saw along the way. Woodlawn was found in 1863, twenty-five years after Brooklyn’s Green-Wood though very much part of the same Garden Cemetery Movement of the mid-eighteenth century. The thing that strikes me the most about Woodlawn vs. Green-Wood is that, generally speaking, the residents of the former were clearly wealthier than the residents of the latter. You can see the Gilded Age wealth in the mausoleums of Frank W. Woolworth, J.C. Penney, and numerous others. On the whole Woodlawn’s resting place are much bigger and on a grander scale than the ones in Green-Wood. Another contrast is that Woodlawn contains many more twentieth and twenty-first century artists. Miles Davis, Duke Ellington, and Illinois Jacquet are there with others in Jazz Corner, a silent testimony to the fact that while most of these men came from elsewhere they saw New York as their home. In our meandering last week we happened upon LeRoy Neiman. I took the pictures you see below and told my friend I would post today, the tenth anniversary of Neiman’s passing.