The Plan: Brooklyn’s Green-Wood Cemetery Comes Alive With a Restored Visitor Hub

The main entrance of the nearly 200-year-old Green-Wood Cemetery at 500 25th Street in Sunset Park, Brooklyn, is adorned with Gothic brownstone arches designed by Richard Upjohn — the architect of Lower Manhattan’s Trinity Church — welcoming guests to the sprawling 478 acres that serve as a public park as well as the final resting place for over 570,000 of what the nonprofit behind Green-Wood refer to as its “permanent residents.” 

As stunning and haunting as the arches are, Green-Wood Cemetery wanted to create a different kind of welcome for visitors before guests go walking up the hill at 25th Street and Fifth Avenue and through those beautiful arches. The nonprofit wanted something more informative and community focused, with a unique historical element only Green-Wood can provide. 

“We had three goals when building this project,” said Lisa Alpert, senior vice president of development and programming at Green-Wood. “One goal was to create a visitor experience. We clock in just over 500,000 visitors every year, and yet we had no real formal visitor welcome experience.” 

Scheduled to open April 18, the new Green-House at Green-Wood is an education and welcome center, as well as a mini-
museum and gallery space comprising the restored Victorian-era Weir Greenhouse (built in 1895) and a new building that will serve as office and gallery space, an information center, a classroom, a research center and an archive. 

The new building was designed by Architecture Research Office (ARO), while C&G Partners did the exhibition design. 

“The greenhouse is individually landmarked,” said Stephen Cassell, principal at ARO. “When we approached the project, it was from the view of: How do you add on to a landmark like this, and how do you work with landmarks and collaborate in a way that celebrates the form and the quality of the greenhouse?” 

ARO did that by creating a low-volume building that surrounds the greenhouse, highlighting its corner location and access to the cemetery across the street. 

“Our goal was to create a subtle, elegant backdrop for the greenhouse that was clearly a modern building that played off the relationship between the new and the old,” Cassell said. 

The building features an aubergine-colored terra cotta exterior meant to highlight the greenhouse. Inside, the historic greenhouse has been restored to serve as a gallery and event space, allowing Green-Wood greater freedom to host events year-round. 

Embedded in the floor of the greenhouse is a large, detailed map of the entire cemetery. 

“For the restoration of the greenhouse, it was basically taken apart into many pieces and put back together,” said Kim Yao, principal of ARO. “It looks in some ways simple, but it’s a very complicated structure. All the glazing is complicated, and it can take very limited additional structural loading. But when we started this there was just a dirt, mud floor. So a big part of our specific challenge with this building was to take the shell, this very fragile shell, that was being restored, and make the space on the inside functional for all that Green-Wood had envisioned.”

Amanda Schiavo can be reached at aschiavo@commercialobserver.com.