Green-Wood Historic Fund honors legendary author-documentarian Geoffrey Ward
Cemetery Takes Another Step in its Transformation into a Place of Living History
It’s rare that the legacy of a great man coincides comfortably with that of a very bad one, but that is just what happened at Green-Wood Cemetery on Wednesday night, when the Green-Wood Historic Fund bestowed an award named for one of New York’s greatest men onto the great-grandson of one of its most notorious. Accepting the ninth annual DeWitt Clinton Award for Excellence, author and seven-time Emmy Award-winner Geoffrey Ward described his ancestor, swindler Ferdinand Ward, as “the Bernie Madoff of his day — a man without a single redeeming characteristic whatever.”
It should probably come as no surprise that both former New York Gov. Clinton and Sing Sing prison alumnus Ward are interred at Green-Wood as well. Both are, in the parlance of cemetery staff, “permanent residents.”
Cemeteries are typically thought of as static structures — silent, forbidding necropolises upon which the living intrude only for funerals and occasional, solemn visits. In honoring a historian with Geoffrey Ward’s renown, Green-Wood continues to transform its focus from the dead onto the living.