Ink Maps

Join me this Saturday for a visit to Bayside Cemetery in Ozone Park, Queens, one of the oldest Jewish cemeteries in New York. It's an amazing place, overgrown within an urban forest, and containing graves back to the 19th century. It has also experienced vandalism and desecration of its graves going back to the 1950s, and we will hear about the preservation efforts of some dedicated volunteers. This is the last event of the fall cemetery series I've been coordinating for Atlas Obscura, and I guarantee that even if you are a  native New Yorker, you've likely never seen a place in your city quite like this. Tickets here.

Library in the Masonic Grand Lodge of New York. See more photos of the lodge here.

Tickets are still available to join me this Saturday for an obscure art/history walk through Woodlawn Cemetery. The place has 1,300 mausoleums, but we will scout out a few that are especially interesting, like the Untermyer Memorial designed by Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney in 1925. It opens on three sides with metal doors and reveals these sculptures within.

I remember back in 2010 when I went up to Dia: Beacon spying a strange structure from the train: a crumbling castle on an island in the Hudson River. I later found out that this was known as the “Bannerman Castle” and then I wondered… can I go there (legally)? And indeed, you can take a boat to a tour there, and that’s what I did last weekend... read more.

You all should really stop encouraging me with this taxidermy stuff. But if you insist, here is a geographical grotesquerie of a South American leopard killing a North American armadillo at the Vanderbilt Museum on Long Island. They both scream in quiet horror at their taxidermy fate. 

Taxidermy animals in the Trophy Room of the Explorers Club in New York. 

"The Cathedral of St. John the Divine as it will look when completed." From "Famous Cathedrals and Their Stories," by Edwin Rayner, 1935.

1967 photograph by James Jowers of the New York Public Library.

I'll be spending the night there tomorrow for the Find the Future game.