Secret City Woodlawn Cemetery and the Buried History of New York

1 I Call On Herman Melville I first glimpsed Woodlawn through the window of a commuter express train. It was just another of the half-dozen Bronx stops I sped past twice each workday, and the concrete platforms and dull green signs of the Woodlawn station indicated nothing more than a disheveled collection of auto body shops, track yards, and overgrown lots framing an old, gray cemetery tucked against the city's northern border. It was, like so much of my native borough, just somewhere settled in some vague past and then left to its inevitable anonymous fade. If I happened to look up from my newspaper, I never gave the place a thought. And I certainly never imagined that some years later, in the wake of that terrible and inconceivable New York September, I would slip my moorings and drift out on the ocean of the city, floating without aim until the currents delivered me up to the ghosts of Woodlawn. If I'm to be honest, I should say that I didn't even know I was drifting--just that I was suddenly having trouble sleeping. I live on a quiet street just beyond the fringe of the city these days and I'd never had a problem turning myself off before, even when I had an apartment across the street from the noisiest biker bar in Brooklyn. Back then, it fell to my girlfriend--bloodshot and bleary-eyed--to fill me in the next afternoon about the drag races which had shattered the sleep of everyone else at closing time. She would conjure malevolent chrome and black Harley choppers with glasspack-amplified exhaust systems roaring like rockets on a trajectory straight for either hell or Bay Ridge, whichever came first. For all I knew--blissful, unperturbed log that I was--she was making it up. Lately, however, I'd found myself dozing off earlier and earlier only to awaken at four, or two, or even midnight. The worst were the foggy or rainy nights when the nearby airport rerouted incoming jets right over my house. Then I'd snap awake with a sharp stab of panic at the ominous crescendo of enormous engines which, although actually high above, sounded as if they were about to crash through the roof and obliterate the house. Nothing could lull me back to sleep, especially not the late-night news programs on the radio. If I went downstairs to reheat the coffee, just a glance at the day's spent grounds turned my stomach. The next morning on the train, exhausted and frazzled, I read my paper as I'd always done but without real comprehension, the words floating in the air before my red eyes like bits of disembodied ash that could never be put together again. And it wasn't just me. Everyone on the train, in the street, at work, lunch, or even just grabbing a smoke in front of the office buildings, was the same. That is, they were the same as they'd always been but different. Mourning hung like a gray cloud, yes, but it was more: a new uncertainty about things never questioned, a feeling of deep doubt akin to the first time you heard your father tell someone a lie. I don't know what others did, but I soon realized there were evenings when I needn't bother trying to get back to sleep. Instead, I surrendered and took to bicycling through the empty late-night streets of New York City. Although my nocturnal sojourns were my own idea, I owed the original impetus for biking to my doctor. He's a nice guy, young and very low-key, and I like him despite the fact that he's conspicuously solemn in the manner of all modern doctors. As a kid I rode the bus with my grandmother for many of her frequent visits to a physician on the Grand Concourse--she had a heart condition--and I remember those appointments as something warm and congenial. After her exams, the doctor, a gray-haired man who favored vibrant silk ties and had a small pencil mustache like the urbane Manhattan gentlemen in Depression-era movies, would sit with her in his office and talk and laugh and share a smoke. Not something you'd want to see in your docGoodman, Fred is the author of 'Secret City Woodlawn Cemetery and the Buried History of New York', published 2004 under ISBN 9780767906470 and ISBN 0767906470.