Claude Bragdon's Account of the Location of his House
From More Lives Than One, By Claude Bragdon, p. 38

We lived in a beautiful spot, part of Warner Park, once a private estate crowning a ridge of land which forms the southern rampart of the city, the towers and steeples of which smouldered and glittered above the tree-tops on the northern horizon Just outside our dining-room window was a bird-haunted grove, the last surviving remnant of what had once been a primeval forest. We heard the liquid note of the wood-thrush and the plaintive cry of the peewee morning and evening. Pheasants paraded on our lawn, and rabbits squirrels, and chipmunks accepted us as part of their environment. The eminence upon which the house stood was part of the terminal moraine of a great glacier; it had once been the site of an Indian burying-ground, and in times more recent a vineyard, the terracing of which was faintly visible. With Mount Hope Cemetery just to the west of us, and the Penitentiary and State Hospital farther away to the south, we were never bothered by burglars or tramps as were the residents of the fashionable East Avenue district, adjoining the New York Central Railroad. The proximity of the vast Garden of Sleep never used to disturb us; shut off by a stone wall topped by a high iron fence, it seemed as remote as death seems, of which it was of course a reminder. But why is it that Christians as a rule do not like thus to be reminded? Pagan Greeks, with no hope of heaven, made their Street of Tombs a place where people took their recreation at the close of day; nor are the so-called Heathen frightened of graveyards: my friend the Tea Salesman told me that the only place in which he could pursue his meditations without fear of disturbance was Mount Hope Cemetery at night.