Brooklyn

The historic Green-Wood Cemetery—the final resting place of Leonard Bernstein and half a million others—explores a cutting-edge method of processing human ...

“They started calling it the Hannibal Lecter bill,” Moylan said. Another promise of electric cremation, according to DFW, is that the use of lower temperatures result in less wear and tear. “It’s about a hundred and ninety thousand therms a year.” A therm is the energy content of about a hundred cubic feet of natural gas. Each of the past two years, Green-Wood has had to rebuild two of its five units. Barna said that he and Moylan discussed taking a trip to Europe, to see one of these cremators “in action.” But they discovered that DFW doesn’t ship its product across the Atlantic. “We really want to be good citizens,” Moylan said. (“We don’t sell in America,” Sjaak Zutt, a DFW executive, told me.) Moylan and Barna began looking for an American cremator company with an electric model. New York City is in the process of greatly reducing the use of fossil-fuel-burning equipment in its buildings. To limit equipment and fertilizer use, and to increase the amount of organic matter in the soil, the staff is allowing nearly fifty acres of Green-Wood to turn to meadow. “He’s here,” Moylan said, of his father, who died in 1982 and was buried at the cemetery, four years before Moylan became president. “We didn’t want people to come in here. Moylan became the president of Brooklyn’s Green-Wood Cemetery, his job was to help with the landscaping.