Woodlawn Cemetery to offer tours in April

Woodlawn Cemetery in the Bronx is an outdoor museum where the public can visit the final resting places of some of the nation's most notable names.

Brian Sahd, executive director of Friends of Woodland Cemetery, said the 400-acre burial ground is more than just a cemetery.

"It's a national historic landmark," said Sahd, who will be guiding bike tours at the 150-year-old cemetery beginning in April. "It is a cultural and environmental institution that has some of the largest architectural mausoleums in the country."

A nonsectarian cemetery where anyone can be buried, Woodlawn contains a who's who of American business, literature, entertainment and journalism. Industry titans, such as 19th century retail store magnates F.W. Woolworth and R.C. Macy as well as newspaper baron Joseph Pulitzer, rest here, as do New York City Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia and American writer Herman Melville, Sahd said.

The cemetery also is the resting place of a number of famous jazz musicians -- including Miles Davis, Lionel Hampton and Duke Ellington -- he said.

"It's awe inspiring to walk through the cemetery and read the tombstones of these rich and famous African Americans," said Sahd, a former urban planner with the New York Restoration Project that oversees the city's community gardens.

Social activist and NAACP philanthropist Madam C.J. Walker, who was born to freed slaves two years after the Civil War and became a self-made millionaire after launching the first black women's hair care and cosmetic line, is buried at Woodlawn.

Her daughter, A'Lelia Walker, a Harlem Renaissance socialite and cultural philanthropist, is also buried there.

"Both these women embodied the eras they lived in," said their descendant A'Lelia Bundles, author of "Joy Goddess: A'Lelia Walker and the Harlem Renaissance." Bundles holds her book lectures at Woodlawn.

As the azaleas and rhododendron bloom, Friends of Woodlawn Cemetery will offer a bicycle tour April 22.

"Bike riding through the cemetery offers access to parts that are not normally traveled by foot," Sahd said.

Another spring feature is a bird watching tour that will be given by New York City Audubon Society guides.

"Thousands of birds come here in the spring," he said.

The bird watching tour begins at 7 a.m. April 29.

All tours cost $15.

Sahd said Woodlawn "is an open space and we want people to use this nontraditional space as a park which will always be sacred."