Greenwood Cemetery and Prospect Park

Here I sit, alone on a Friday night, cuz that's how I roll. No really, I'm hanging out tomorrow night so tonight is my "in" night. In fact, tomorrow during the day, I'm going to the Brooklyn Museum of Art with Karishma and friends, but first it's brunch at Tom's Restaurant, not to be confused with Tom's Diner of Suzanne Vega's song and of Seinfeld fame (Karishma has also apparently stumbled upon this one too, up on the upper east side). After that I'll probably be hanging out with another friend at night. Then Sunday, Karishma and I will try to picnic somewhere if the weather actually is nice for a change.

I say that like it's been all rain here. We did have a nice sunny day on Thursday which I took advantage of. A stroll through Greenwood Cemetery, one of the oldest cemeteries in New York, began the afternoon, followed by a picnic in Prospect Park and a leisurely stroll up Flatbush Avenue. There's loads to know about Greenwood cemetery like, I found out there are catacombs there, there is a species of parrot that was introduced to the park and still survives there and tons of famous people are buried there, the likes of Samuel Morse, Theodore Roosevelt Sr., Elias Howe (inventor of the first patent for the sewing machine) and even a few notorious gangsters like William "Bill the Butcher" Poole (Daniel Day Lewis' character in Gangs of New York was based on him). Some of this stuff I found out after having already gone and missed out on these things, like the fact that there are trolley tours and that the Prospect Park West entrance is closed except on weekends (I had planned on walking through the cemetery but instead walked all the way across it before realizing I had passed the Prospect Park West entrance, then realized, upon doubling back, that I was going to have to walk all the way back to the 5th avenue entrance).

I'll go back some day, because it's close enough that I can see one side of it from 8th avenue and it will take a long time and multiple visits to explore the whole thing. At any rate, for the curious, here's a link to the main web page and here are some other fun sites with information:

Find famous people's graves
Yelp article for Greenwood
Brooklyn About.com site

And here's an album of photos taken on my walk:

Greenwood and Prospect