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"Cemetery." Not a great way to start a conversation with a stranger, is it?  Today all things deathly are impolite.  But it wasn't that way in years gone by.  Passing was something to be embraced.   For two hundred years, urban American Christians were buried in churchyards.  Then things got crowded and large cemeteries were born.  Boston's Mount Auburn, Philadelphia's Laurel Hill, and Brooklyn's Green-Wood were all founded in the first half of the 19th century on rolling expanses of rural land.  Mourning lasted an entire year in genteel families.  "Mourning" stores dotted downtowns, where dignified clothing, visiting cards, window drapings and all the necessary accoutrements of a ìproperî bereavement could be purchased.  But hand in gray kid glove, a fun side flourished at the cemeteries.  Burial grounds were places of joy. Until the opening of Central and Prospect Parks in Manhattan (1857) and Brooklyn (1867), these two then-independent cities... http://www.spankmetoday.dreamhosters.c...