You take the number four train up to the last stop in the Bronx, walk to the main gate of Woodlawn Cemetery, just say, “Hey Manny, what’s up,” and suddenly the concrete of the city gives way and you walk into a tree wonderland. They opened this place in 1863 while the Civil War was still bleeding out, carving four hundred acres of silence out of the noise of New York. Beneath the rolling dirt lies the kind of royalty that built the skyline and wrote the soundtrack of the American century. You have Herman Melville resting under the soil, not far from the brassy ghost of Duke Ellington holding down the Jazz Corner, while F.W. Woolworth sleeps out eternity in his marble palace.
But the real monuments here are not the headstones. Back in the early days, the groundskeepers decided this resting place needed a touch of the exotic, ordering hundreds of delicate Japanese maples to shade the lawns. Then, in a stroke of absolute genius, they did the most un-New York thing imaginable: they left them alone. Instead of manicuring them into polite little garden shrubs, the landscapers let the maples run wild and unpruned for over a century.
Today, those saplings have warped and twisted into massive, sprawling sculptures. In the heat of the summer, they cast a delicate, lacy green canopy over the graves. Come autumn, they explode into a violent show of blood-red and burnt-orange. Almost as good is the sight of the narrow black branches in the dead of winter against the snow. It is a silent army of more than three hundred historic trees gripping the earth over the bones of the famous and the forgotten, putting on the greatest, quietest show in the Bronx.