With climate change at the forefront of the national conversation and April 2020 marking the 50th anniversary of Earth Day, it's high time to take a dive into Brooklyn's environmental history. This City Story explores the impact of industrialization along Brooklyn's waterways, sites of notorious pollution, sustainability challenges, the effects of increased temperatures on our coastlines, and the changing ecology of our urban landscape.

New York City abounds with tales of ghosts, and with each retelling, we breathe new life into these stories. In the grand Halloween tradition, join us as we venture into the most haunted sites of our city.

Green-Wood Cemetery Gates ca. 1865 One of the most splendid monuments of Brooklyn, this unique entrance to the cemetery combines offices, gates, a clock tower, and a spire in one imposing structure. It was designed by Richard Michell Upjohn, the son of the leading architect of the Gothic tradition in New York. The younger Upjohn also designed the Connecticut State Capitol at Hartford.

Green-Wood, with more than 600 mausoleums and other buildings, offers a spectacular display of nineteenth-century architectural styles. On the streets of New York, tearing down buildings every generation and replacing them with "the latest" has become something of a habit. But at Green-Wood, once a building goes up, it almost always stays up. Want to see what NYC's buildings looked like more than a century ago? You've come to the right place! This tour, a walk of about a half-mile, offers you a stroll through a quiet landscape as well as fascinating information about each of the five intriguing stops along the way. In order to walk it, you will proceed up the incline of Battle Hill to near the highest point in Brooklyn. Your legs will thank you! And if you would like to explore more of Green-Wood, get our app at the App Store. Trees, monuments, great stories, and more!

Green-Wood Cemetery Gates, 25th Street, 1899. The Gothic Revival entrance gates and clocktower were designed by the firm ecclesiastical architect Richard Upjohn and son Richard M. Upjohn — both Brooklyn residents, later interred at Green-Wood — and completed in 1865. As described the Landmarks Preservation Commission's 1966 Designation Report, the Upjohn-designed entrance "represents an ingenious linking together and piling up of architectural elements to create an impressive main gateway to the cemetery." Green-Wood's gates are also home to an unexpected population of cemetery guests: a colony of monk parakeets, allegedly escapees from an illicit shipment to Idlewild Airport (JFK).

While most of this series has focused on some of New York's interior spaces as we've been stuck in our apartments, we thought for this one we'd try something different. So we've turned our gaze to some of the best places for New Yorkers to escape to: the parks of New York! Specifically, how three of New York's most iconic parks connect.

Founded in 1838 and now a National Historic Landmark, Green-Wood was one of the first rural cemeteries in America. By the early 1860s, it had earned an international reputation for its magnificent beauty and became the prestigious place to be buried, attracting 500,000 visitors a year, second only to Niagara Falls as the nation’s greatest tourist attraction. Crowds flocked there to enjoy family outings, carriage rides, and sculpture viewing in the finest of first generation American landscapes. Green-Wood’s popularity helped inspire the creation of public parks, including New York City’s Central and Prospect Parks. This tour takes you through some of the monuments of Green-Wood and its famous denizens.

2019 has been as busy as ever at Urban Archive as we've added more locations, collections, and posts to the platform. Here are some interesting facts, stories, and images from throughout the five boroughs that we dug up along the way.

A fundamental role of the cemetery is to ensure a peaceful, final resting place for loved ones. They are also extraordinary living records of our society. Historic cemeteries tell us about design, ideas about mortality and death, and the historical social and political hierarchies of a locality. Especially important is the rural cemetery. Distinct from church graveyards, this is a 19th-century culmination of a movement that began in 18th-century Europe. The rural cemetery drew heavily on early garden aesthetics, embracing classical ideals of a pastoral utopia as embodied in the Greek region of Arcadia. In fact, nascent cemeteries evolved from garden memorials and burials, leading to a revolution in the way Western culture tended to its dead, and forever impacting its landscapes.

Between 1954 and 1957, the Municipal Art Society surveyed historic buildings in all five boroughs to create a database of potential landmarks to preserve. Local residents and MAS staff compiled individual sheets devoted to about 200 buildings. Each sheet outlined the building’s date, location, and style and provided a description and a small photograph. This is the list of Brooklyn buildings.