5. There are strict rules for the cemetery’s ‘permanent residents’

Although the cemetery was never affiliated with a specific church, it strives to remain non-sectarian. The cemetery was generally seen as a Christian burial place for white Anglo-Saxon Protestants of higher social standing although the cemetery was never affiliated with a specific church. With the large number of people buried here, you wouldn’t think there would be certain criteria a dead person would have to meet in order to be allowed to rest there. One of its main regulations is that nobody who was executed for a crime, or died while incarcerated was allowed to be buried here.

Boss Tweed, however, was an exception. After he died at the Ludlow Street Prison, he was able to get around this rule. While Boss Tweed was buried in Green-Wood Cemetery, the mayor of the time, Mayor Smith Ely, refused to fly the flag at half-staff, not considering Boss Tweed worthy of the honor. As The New York Times reported in 1866, “It is the ambition of the New Yorker to live upon Fifth Avenue, take his airings in the [Central] Park and to sleep with his fathers in Green-Wood.”