Weir Greenhouse (Green-House at Green-Wood)

The Weir family had worked in horticulture in Brooklyn since 1850, when the Scottish immigrant James Weir founded a business in Bay Ridge. His eldest son, James Weir Jr., born in England in 1843, set up on his own as a florist in 1861 and in 1866 moved close to Green-Wood Cemetery, founded in 1838 and by then a hugely popular place to walk. In 1880 he had a wood-and-glass greenhouse built at the corner of Fifth Avenue and 25th Street to designs by the Brooklyn architect Mercein Thomas.

In 1895 Weir applied for a permit to alter the building. The work, entrusted to George Curtis Gillespie, was so extensive that little if anything of the first greenhouse survived. The family kept the business until 1971, when it was sold to the McGoverns, who carried on the flower trade as McGovern-Weir. The greenhouse was designated a New York City landmark on 13 April 1982 and listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1984.

Badly deteriorated by the early 2010s, with repairs estimated at a million dollars, it was bought by the cemetery in February 2012 for 1.625 million dollars. The Landmarks Preservation Commission approved its restoration in 2015, the year its structural stabilisation was completed, and the full visitor-center scheme in 2021. Carefully dismantled and rebuilt, the greenhouse became the centrepiece of the Green-House at Green-Wood, a 43-million-dollar project dedicated on 16 April 2026 and opened to the public on 18 April.

Gillespie, who kept offices in Manhattan but lived near the site, designed the building without turning to a greenhouse manufacturer, as Mercein Thomas had done before him. Rectangular in plan and enlivened by projecting bays and domes, the greenhouse combines a timber frame holding the glazing with roofs of glass and galvanised iron. The main entrance, an octagon, is set at an angle to the street corner; its double doors are flanked by wide windows with transoms, topped by a frieze, a cornice and a narrow clerestory.

The sloping glass roof rises to a large octagonal dome with glazed sides and a pointed metal roof bearing the WEIR sign and a weathervane. On Fifth Avenue a rounded bay has a glass roof; on 25th Street an entrance bay frames round-arched doors in a glass screen divided by fan-shaped wooden mullions. A one-storey brick office stands at the rear. The restoration added a new floor, a heating and ventilation system and a replica of the sign. The greenhouse is now wrapped by an L-shaped building of about 1,780 m², clad in glazed terracotta and topped with green roofs, designed by Architecture Research Office and certified LEED Gold.

For almost a century the greenhouse supplied flowers and wreaths to mourners and visitors at the cemetery. Nineteenth-century funeral customs gave flowers a central place, and several florists set up near Green-Wood's entrances; the Weir establishment is the only one left, probably because it holds the most prominent site, directly opposite the main gate. In the 1880s the historian Henry Stiles already described the first greenhouse as fragrant with rare exotics and native flowers arranged around a central rockwork feature.

The restored greenhouse no longer houses a plant collection. Its floor carries an interactive tile map of the cemetery, and it hosts exhibitions, classes, film screenings and ceremonies, along with a flower shop at weekends. Outside, a landscaped courtyard by Michael Van Valkenburgh Associates echoes the winding paths of the cemetery and carries its greenery beyond the gates.

The Green-House at Green-Wood stands at 750 Fifth Avenue, on the corner of 25th Street, directly across from the cemetery's Gothic main entrance arch, designed by Richard Upjohn in 1865. Admission is free. Besides the greenhouse, the center offers welcome services, an exhibition gallery, a classroom, a research center with access to the archives and stations for locating graves. The greenhouse itself takes little time to see; it works best as the starting point for a walk through Green-Wood Cemetery, whose landscaped grounds already drew thousands of visitors in the nineteenth century.