Greenwood Cemetery, Brooklyn

So I'm a little behind in keeping this thing up-to-date. We visited Greenwood Cemetery in Brooklyn a few weekends ago. It's apparently quite famous, and has lots of famous dead people interred there (I think most of them were historic sports celebrities, and I'm just really not familiar with them). It was a VERY nice cemetery, probably the nicest I've ever been to. It was filled with trees, green grass, and lots of squirrels.

They have lots of great sculpture, and tons of family mausoleums dating back to the early years of New York City. I love peeking into the mausoleums for some reason. Some of them have chairs and flowers scattered about so you know people have been there in the last six months. And some look like they haven't been opened in decades.

But, as I said, the sculpture was awesome. They just don't make cemeteries like this anymore, it seems! And maybe I'm particularly entranced by it because where I great up nearly all the cemeteries just had the flat headstones, and they were nearly all the same. I was told this was to make mowing the lawn easier, but I'm not sure that's true. Anyone have any insight into this? Is it just the cost?

I did notice that in this cemetery, as in many cemeteries out here on the East Coast, there are big family plots, and a big family plot usually calls for a large and costly monument of some sort. Seems to me that back in Eastern Washington even if a family does have a whole plot, everyone still gets their own headstone and there isn't necessarily a large, shared monument. What sort of zany conclusions about culture can I draw from this?

Anyway, there were a ton of squirrels, but I didn't manage to get any squirrel pictures. We did walk on Nut Path for a bit, which was quite exciting for me.