This New York City Cemetery Restored a Victorian Greenhouse to Welcome Visitors to Its Historic Grounds

Green-Wood Cemetery in Brooklyn grew out of the 19th-century “rural cemetery” movement that transformed graveyards from cramped and dark to sprawling and beautiful

Sonja Anderson | Daily Correspondent

April 21, 2026

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Brooklyn’s Green-Wood Cemetery—a sprawling, hilly burial ground filled with tombstones from the 19th and 20th centuries—has long been a destination for more than the dead. Established in 1838, the cemetery quickly gained a reputation for its beauty, drawing tourists like other New York attractions such as Niagara Falls. Today, the National Historic Landmark attracts hundreds of thousands of visitors each year, who come to admire Green-Wood’s trees, ponds and valleys.

Now, the cemetery has a “new front door,” Green-Wood president Meera Joshi tells the New York Times’ Winnie Hu. Last week, it unveiled a visitor’s center with exhibitions, research facilities and event space. Dubbed the “Green-House,” the center occupies the recently restored 19th-century Weir Greenhouse that once sold flowers to mourners.

When Green-Wood purchased the greenhouse in 2012 for $1.6 million, it was the “neglected beauty queen across the street,” Joshi tells the Times. Located across from the cemetery’s large neo-Gothic gate, the hothouse was vandalized and weathered but still alluring. In 2023, the Times’ John Freeman Gill described the greenhouse as “a retro spaceship of copper and glass that has just touched down from Victorian Gotham.”

So began a long, expensive construction project. The old greenhouse was refurbished and expanded through a new, attached L-shaped building that has a reading room for researchers, temperature-controlled archives and two galleries hosting rotating exhibitions, reports the Art Newspaper’s Allison C. Meier. The greenhouse’s new tile floor is decorated with a giant map of Green-Wood Cemetery, and it contains a flower stand selling bouquets.

The idea is to orient guests before they ramble among mausoleums and graves.

“Something 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,” Joshi tells the Art Newspaper. “By adding a new front door, you ease the transition and provide better context for the cemetery.”

Green-Wood was one of the United States’ first “rural cemeteries.” These were products of a Romantic, 19th-century philosophy that burial grounds should be pleasant as opposed to the “dark, cramped churchyards” in cities, per the Times. An early example, Mount Auburn Cemetery in Boston, opened in 1831. Writer Fanny Kemble described it as “a pleasure garden instead of a place for graves,” and a Swedish visitor said it “almost excites a wish to die.” Green-Wood opened a few years later, prompting similar reactions.

Among the artifacts on display at the Green-House are handwritten records from Green-Wood’s founding. Its designer, David Bates Douglass, rejected an idea to name the burial ground a “necropolis.”

“A Necropolis is a mere depository for dead bodies,” Douglass wrote, reported the New Yorker’s Paige Williams in 2025. But the name “Green-Wood” suggests “verdure, shade, ruralness, natural beauty, every thing, in short, in contrast with the glare, set form, fixed rule and fashion of the city.”

Green-Wood’s 580,000 “permanent residents” include Civil War generals, baseball greats, artist Jean-Michel Basquiat and composer Leonard Bernstein. People can still be buried there, but space is scarce, and pricey. A single grave costs more than $20,000.

That exclusivity is part of why the cemetery reimagined the old greenhouse as a space for the public.

“It’s inherent to the cemetery business that at some point you will run out of room to bury people, and you really have to think about what will this green space become and how can you make it an asset to the community,” Lisa West Alpert, Green-Wood’s senior vice president of development and programming, told the Times in 2023.

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Sonja Anderson is a daily correspondent for Smithsonian magazine who covers art, archaeology and culture, from newly discovered artifacts to the latest art heists.