Woodlawn Cemetery New York City

While in New York City I visited both Woodlawn Cemetery in The Bronx and Trinity Church Cemetery and discovered the graves of two prominent New York businessmen, Isidor Straus, co-owner of Macy’s Department Stores, and John Jacob Astor IV, real estate tycoon, who both perished on the Titanic on April 15, 1912. As the story […]

Robert Augustus Chesebrough — Inventor of VaselineDiscovered at Woodlawn Cemetery, New York On my walk through Woodlawn Cemetery in New York, I came across the fallen monument marking the grave of Robert Augustus Chesebrough, the chemist who invented and popularized petroleum jelly, known as Vaseline. Born in England to American parents, Chesebrough was raised in […]

On my walk at Woodlawn Cemetery in the Bronx, just across the road from jazz legend Miles Davis’s grave, I discovered the final resting place of the great vibraphonist, drummer, and bandleader Lionel Hampton. At the NBC studio, the vibraphone once sat unused in a corner, only called upon to play the network’s famous bing-bang-bong […]

On my walk at four hundred acre, Woodlawn Cemetery (half the size of Central Park), I was taken aback and in awe of several oversized carvings of wildlife made from fallen or diseased trees. A professional chainsaw carver spent two to three days on each, meticulously crafting the larger-than-life sculptures . Detailed, life-like carvings were located in […]