A hemmed-in cemetery finds bit more space

Extra gravesites provide money for church renovations.

— By New York NEW YORK City standards, it was a modest real estate transaction: not quite four-tenths of an acre for $500,000.

The price was only half of what the cash-poor seller had hoped for. The spacesqueezed buyer got what it desperately needed: more room.

For dead bodies.

The buyer, Green-Wood Cemetery in Brooklyn, is worried about running out of space for graves. The seller, Old First Reformed Church in Park Slope, Brooklyn, does not need the plots that its parishioners never filled in what amounted to a cemetery-within-a-cemetery, a circle of land deep inside Green-Wood that the church had owned since 1860.

Since then, Green-Wood has buried more than 570,000 people in the grounds surrounding the Dell, as Old First’s plot is known — among them newspaper publisher Horace Greeley, political boss William M. Tweed and artist Jean-Michel Basquiat. But Green-Wood, whose 478 acres make it close to 60 percent of the size of Central Park, feels pressed for room as it and other older cemeteries that have been burying bodies for decades confront a finite reality.

“Space is at a premium,” said David Fleming, the legislative director of the New York State Association of Cemeteries, which represents about 600 cemeteries. “Most cemeteries upstate tend to be larger and more rural, so they have the ability to bury for quite some time — a lot of space and not a lot of people in the area. In the boroughs in the city, there are many cemeteries facing significant shortages.”

The space problem is expected to worsen when the baby boomers, the huge post-World War II generation, begin to die in significant numbers.

“We’ve got a bubble coming up,” said Christopher Coutts, an associate professor at Florida State University who has done research on cemetery land-use issues.

But an increase in burials is not the only concern for cemeteries. They also have to take into account expanding waistlines. Americans are larger than ever, a problem for cemeteries since they could require wider graves. And wider graves mean fewer graves.

“You don’t want to make all of these graves extra large, because it’s not an efficient use of land,” said Robert M. Fells, executive director and general counsel of the International Cemetery, Cremation and Funeral Association. “The rule of thumb is, per acre you can accommodate between 800 and 1,200 graves. That depends on how large each grave is.

“If you decide we’re worried about obese remains and we’re going to put in only 800 graves,” he continued, “that’s 400 graves you’re not going to have down the road.”

There are larger-thanstandard-size coffins that can accommodate someone weighing as much as 300 pounds without requiring a larger grave, said John O. Mitchell IV, an at-large representative of the National Funeral Directors Association who is the president of a funeral home and a cemetery in Maryland. He estimated that 20 years ago, 1 in 50 burials needed such a coffin. Now, he said, the comparable number is 1 in 30.

“It’s still a small percentage,” Mitchell said, “but if it keeps going, eventually cemeteries will have to rethink how much space they plan for.”

The pressure for space would be more acute if it were not for the growing preference among Americans for cremations. About 40 percent of people who died in New York state last year were cremated, and nationally cremations outnumbered burials in 2016 for the first time, but only barely.

So older urban cemeteries are scrambling to make the most of the space they have. Some have closed roads and walkways so they can dig graves in the ground underneath. Some have bought additional land. But some have reached their limit. Trinity Church Cemetery in New York’s Washington Heights neighborhood stopped selling burial plots in 2010. (It still buries those who bought plots, or whose ancestors did.)

Carlton Basmajian, an associate professor at Iowa State University who is collaborating with Coutts, said cemeteries like Trinity and Green-Wood “are in the middle of cities now but were once, in the 19th century when Green-Wood was laid out, on the developed fringe.”

“Brooklyn was still countryside, part suburb, part farming,” he said, “and you see this in Chicago, Indianapolis, Cleveland. They get hemmed in.”

Green-Wood predicted as far back as 2002 that it would have no more grave sites to sell by 2008. By 2010, its president, Richard J. Moylan, was saying that it would be forced to stop selling plots in about five years.

The deal for the extra space gave Green-Wood 200 additional burial sites “at most,” Moylan said, so he continues to be concerned about how long he will have empty grave sites.

“I’m still saying five years,” he said, “but now it’s probably a real five years.”

Green-Wood averages about 1,200 burials a year, he said.

It is selling single graves, with room for three bodies, for $18,000 each, up from $11,000 in 2010.

The deal with the church effectively undid a transaction completed just before the Civil War.

The church bought lots in a cemetery that was working to catch on — Green-Wood. The church closed its own burial ground on Fulton Street, disinterring and moving the bodies, including some that had been laid to rest before the Revolutionary War.

“Green-Wood was a great vision, but it was not successful for a long time,” said the Rev. Daniel Meeter, the pastor of Old First.

“One of the things they did was they started asking churches if they would consider burying their dead at Green-Wood instead of in their graveyards. So to help Green-Wood, we purchased” the plots in 1860.

Moylan said eight other churches had bought space for burials at Green-Wood; he said he did not foresee any more buyback deals. “

I don’t think any of them have anywhere near the amount of space that this one had,” he said.

The church hoped that Green-Wood would pay $1 million for the land, said Meeter, who noted that the church’s last plot at GreenWood had gone for $22,000.

“If you multiply 400 sites by $25,000 each, that was our dream number,” he recalled — $10 million. “We never thought we’d get that much.”

Moylan called the transaction “a win-win”: The church got money for its restoration, and Green-Wood got space it could use.

He said Green-Wood had a staff member who had been “working really hard to find space.”

“He goes through section by section and finds available space,” Moylan said. “This will help.”

‘If you multiply 400 sites by $25,000 each, that was our dream number ($10 million) . ... We never thought we’d get that much.’ The Rev. Daniel Meeter,

Old First Reformed Church in Park Slope, Brooklyn

JUSTIN GILLILAND / THE NEW YORK TIMES Old First Reformed Church’s the Rev. Daniel Meeter reads a grave marker on the circle of property Old First sold to Green-Wood Cemetery in Brooklyn, New York — the land is essentially a cemetery within a cemetery. The church did not need the plots that...