Landmark Status Official For Portions Of Green-Wood Cemetery

The Landmarks Preservation Commission voted in favor of landmark status for a series of extremely significant properties and neighborhoods across the city and Brooklyn, including our own historic Green-Wood Cemetery.

Yesterday’s meeting makes the outcome official after a February meeting which addressed the LPC’s backlog of 95 properties. The LPC decided in that meeting to keep portions of Green-Wood Cemetery, as well as nearby St. Augustine Roman Catholic Church in Park Slope and 28 other properties on its calendar to prioritize for designation by the end of 2016.

Sections of Green-Wood Cemetery were granted landmark status, including the Green-Wood Chapel, a Gothic structure completed in 1911. Warren and Wetmore, the architects of the chapel, were also responsible for designing Grand Central Terminal, the Yale Club, and the New York Yacht Club.

The Gatehouse and Gatehouse Cottage — both located at the Fort Hamilton Parkway entrance of the cemetery — were also officially landmarked.

According to the Brooklyn Daily Eagle, Green-Wood Cemetery had long been “opposed to landmarking the entire cemetery — whose burial plots have 200,000 living owners. The Greenwood Heights graveyard averages 1,200 burials annually.”

Although the entire cemetery was initially proposed for designation, Green-Wood requested that the cemetery as an entity be taken off the LPC list. YIMBY reports that it “just isn’t feasible, given the number of family-owned structures on the 478-acre property. Some individual structures on the property are already landmarks and the recommendation is to designate the chapel, caretaker’s residence, and visitors cottage.”

Do you have a favorite structure or aspect of Green-Wood?