On a sunny day in Green-Wood Cemetery last week, the magnolia and cherry trees were in bloom while a group of students busily tended to historic gravestones and vaults. While one group of students hoisted a monument back into place, others dug out a gravestone that had settled into the earth, while several more carefully repointed a granite vault.
The 13 students at work are all part of Bridge to Crafts Careers program, which gives them the opportunity to learn the important basics of the construction trade while getting hands-on masonry restoration experience in one of Brooklyn’s important scenic landscapes.
They are about halfway through the 10-week program, a collaboration with Opportunities for a Better Tomorrow and the World Monuments Fund. World Monuments Fund launched the program in 2015 at Woodlawn Cemetery in the Bronx, and since then more than 600 students have trained in the two historic cemeteries.
While the hands-on work is focused on restoration and preservation, it is centered around demonstrating work safety and work site standards.
“This is about teaching and learning, not just about getting work done,” instructor Neela Wickremsinghe, the Robert A. and Elizabeth Rohn Jeffe Director of Restoration and Preservation at Green-Wood, told Brownstoner. Students receive the training necessary for their OSHA certification and are paid during the length of program. There are also specialized workshops and field trips and students have a chance to hear from professionals in the field.
The 2025 class is the seventh group of students to participate at Green-Wood, and each class has focused on a different section of the cemetery. The goal is to provide a mix of materials and restoration needs for the students to tackle.
“This allows everyone a breadth of experience and to be able to understand the differences on a conservation level between deterioration on brownstone and deterioration on granite,” Wickremsinghe shared. This year’s work area includes four in-hill vaults and brownstone, marble, and granite monuments.
In addition to different materials, the varying dates of the monuments also reflect the reality of the site as an historic and contemporary place of burial. It’s another learning opportunity for the students to work on a job site that is still an active place of burial and remembrance.
Some of the historic marble monuments in the work area are already a newly gleaming white. “The restoration aspect of it is one of my favorite parts,” student Elijah Jaber said. “It went from this brown marble to this beautiful white marble all over again. That was one of the best feelings.”
Another recently completed project was lifting a petite marker for a child’s grave. It had sunk below the ground so that only a small sliver of the top of the gravestone showed. The restored marker is now fully visible and cleaned. While the monuments are the focus now, Wickremsinghe noted that she also works with the horticulture department so that planting plans for the area are ready when the work is completed.
At the end of the program, a graduation ceremony will take place amid the gravestones so the students can show off their work.
This story first appeared on Brooklyn Paper’s sister site Brownstoner
