In '' The Secret City : Woodlawn Cemetery and the Buried History of New York , '' Fred Goodman haunts the pastoral 400 acres in the Bronx in which 300,000 bodies are buried , including those of Herman Melville , Duke Ellington , Robert Moses and Joseph Pulitzer , alongside onetime celebrities slipping into oblivion , like the satirist Finley Peter Dunne or the former reform mayor John Purroy Mitchel .