{"id":201199,"date":"2026-04-17T21:17:48","date_gmt":"2026-04-17T21:17:48","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/201199\/"},"modified":"2026-04-17T21:17:48","modified_gmt":"2026-04-17T21:17:48","slug":"restored-victorian-greenhouse-links-brooklyns-green-wood-cemetery-to-its-living-neighbours-the-art-newspaper","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/201199\/","title":{"rendered":"Restored Victorian greenhouse links Brooklyn’s Green-Wood Cemetery to its living neighbours – The Art Newspaper"},"content":{"rendered":"

When Brooklyn\u2019s Green-Wood Cemetery opened in 1838, it was one of the first in what is known as the American rural cemetery movement, emerging at a time when cities were growing and their burial grounds had become overcrowded. These new sprawling landscapes allowed the living to remember the dead amid nature and statuary. Established before major civic projects like Central Park and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Green-Wood became a popular place to escape the bustle of the city on the rolling hills overlooking New York Harbor.<\/p>\n

Nearly 190 years later, the city has grown around Green-Wood, with businesses and apartment buildings bordering it on all sides. Its 478 acres still serve as an urban escape; although burials continue, many people come just to walk, birdwatch or even see a concert or film. Now, a new welcome and education centre is extending the cemetery into the neighbourhood.<\/p>\n

\u201cHaving a part of Green-Wood outside of our gates meets people in the community where they are,\u201d says Meera Joshi, the cemetery\u2019s president. \u201cAnd it allows them to feel more comfortable and learn to love Green-Wood the way so many of us who wander these paths already do.\u201d<\/p>\n

The Green-House, as the new centre is called, is located across the street from the cemetery\u2019s main entrance and has its public opening this weekend (18 and 19 April)<\/a>. Its focal point is a restored cast-iron and glass structure, the city\u2019s only surviving Victorian commercial greenhouse. Built in 1895, it was formerly the Weir Greenhouse (its historic wire screen sign still tops its copper-clad dome). Both the greenhouse and Green-Wood Cemetery are listed on the National Register of Historic Places<\/a>\u2014the former since 1984 and the latter since 1997.<\/p>\n

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Green-Wood Cemetery’s new Green-House welcome centre Photo: Maike Schulz, courtesy of Green-Wood Cemetery<\/p>\n

A sense of arrival<\/p>\n

Green-Wood acquired the landmarked greenhouse from McGovern Florists in 2012 for $1.6m. At the time, it was in a deteriorated condition, with damage to the glass and its wooden frames rotting. While restoration progressed over the years, breaking ground for the new centre that wraps around it in an L shape did not take place until 2023. Where once mourners stopped in to buy flowers on their way to visit graves, visitors can now orient themselves with the new tile map of the cemetery covering the greenhouse\u2019s floor.<\/p>\n

\u201cSomething that Green-Wood and many cemeteries experience is that there is a natural human fear or tendency to avoid matters of death and being in places that remind us of our own mortality,\u201d Joshi says. Many locals may also remember being turned away when the cemetery was closed to the public from the 1980s until 2000. <\/p>\n

The Green-House is a less intimidating way of accessing the cemetery, as opposed to what has been standard for decades: climbing up a steep hill to an imposing 1860s neo-Gothic brownstone arch and being met with a labyrinthine choice of paths. \u201cBy adding a new front door, you ease the transition and provide better context for the cemetery,\u201d Joshi says.<\/p>\n

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Courtesy of Green-Wood Cemetery<\/p>\n

The Brooklyn-based Architecture Research Office (ARO) designed the new addition that joins the greenhouse at the centre. (The project cost $34m in total.) The terracotta-clad building holds classrooms for school programmes, offices, a reading room for researchers, environmentally controlled storage for archives and two galleries for rotating exhibitions. The Green-Wood Historic Fund has an extensive collection of art and objects related to the cemetery\u2019s \u201ceternal residents\u201d, including George Bellows, George Catlin, William Merritt Chase, Leon Golub, Nancy Spero and Louis Comfort Tiffany. However, these pieces have rarely been on public view.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe building serves almost as a backdrop and, by adding in the glazed terracotta, we felt like this was a way to do a modern interpretation of the brownstone that you see on the 1860s arch, which has a hint of red,\u201d says Stephen Cassell, a principal at ARO. An entry courtyard with benches and landscaping by Michael Van Valkenburgh Associates also brings out some of the nature of the cemetery into the semi-industrial neighbourhood. \u201cThis is really speaking to the next evolution of Green-Wood, as it becomes as much an arts and cultural organisation with a deep history and connection to nature,\u201d Cassell says.<\/p>\n

ARO has regularly worked on projects that sensitively engage with historic architecture, from the factory interiors of Dia Chelsea<\/a> to the restoration of the Manhattan home and studio of the artist Donald Judd<\/a>. But the cemetery project may be closest to the firm\u2019s work on the restoration and campus expansion of the Rothko Chapel<\/a> in Houston. It involved a welcome centre that likewise oriented visitors to what can be an uncommon experience: the Rothko Chapel with its heavy silence and the cemetery with its closeness to mortality.<\/p>\n

\u201cIn many of these projects with historic fabric, there\u2019s a tremendous opportunity to save, reveal, celebrate and utilise those materials or those structures in ways that are embedded in the experience and the understanding of the history of the place,\u201d says Kim Yao, another ARO principal. She emphasises that throughout the Green-House, the firm wanted to create a \u201csense of arrival\u201d for the visitor. \u201cThere\u2019s this constant orientation of the body towards that view of the cemetery with the transparency of the terracotta-clad fa\u00e7ade, as well as the greenhouse itself being a glass jewel on the corner,\u201d she says.<\/p>\n

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Jean Shin\u2019s Offering (2026), an earthwork just inside the cemetery\u2019s neo-Gothic brownstone gates Photo: Maike Schulz, courtesy of Green-Wood Cemetery<\/p>\n

As burial rates decline in the US in favour of cremation, and as the little available room for interment is being filled, cemeteries across the country are at risk of becoming disused space. By focusing outward on the community, they can cultivate new audiences and involve them in caring for the cemeteries\u2019 future.<\/p>\n

Endurance and remembrance<\/p>\n

The first contemporary-art exhibition in the Green-House galleries is titled Celadon Landscape<\/a>, an installation by the local artist Jean Shin, involving shards of Korean ceramics in a meditation on cultural diaspora. It coincides with the planting of native wildflowers on a long-term Shin earthwork informed by Korean mourning rituals. Called Offering<\/a>, the piece is located just inside the cemetery gates. Interred within its mound are elder trees from Green-Wood, which have been felled because of disease or age, and material excavated during burials. Volunteer gardeners will participate in its year-round care.<\/p>\n

\u201cI love that my work will be in conversation with those who come here to grieve, as well as those who seek solace in the extraordinary landscape,\u201d Shin says. \u201cWhether mourning fallen trees or rescuing discarded artefacts, my practice is a journey towards healing\u2014honouring and repurposing what has been lost, both ecologically and culturally. The cemetery\u2019s context invites us to consider death not as an ending but as a beginning: what endures, and what is remembered.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"When Brooklyn\u2019s Green-Wood Cemetery opened in 1838, it was one of the first in what is known as…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":201200,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[36],"tags":[98,100,99,79826,892,3139,72174,9,24,63,8074],"class_list":{"0":"post-201199","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-brooklyn","8":"tag-brooklyn","9":"tag-brooklyn-headlines","10":"tag-brooklyn-news","11":"tag-burial","12":"tag-heritage","13":"tag-museums-heritage","14":"tag-national-register-of-historic-places","15":"tag-new-york","16":"tag-new-york-city","17":"tag-nyc","18":"tag-openings"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/201199","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=201199"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/201199\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/201200"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=201199"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=201199"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=201199"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}