The River Oaks of cemeteries
150-year-old Glenwood draws wealthy residents who create their own luxury plots
Status symbols come in many forms — designer handbags and flashy cars, or maybe a vacation home, yacht or a private jet. The newest financial watermark for Houston’s elite comes in an unexpected form: upscale cemetery plots.
They’re created with the help of architects and landscape architects and stone imported from around the world, and they’re sited as if their “residents” will forever enjoy the view of a small lake, shady trees or modern city skyline.
The city’s most interesting — and likely most expensive — final resting place is the 150-year-old Glenwood Cemetery, where titans of industry can pay millions of dollars for a large plots of land where they and other family members are to be buried.
“I have a standing joke that I spend half of my time in River Oaks and the other half in Glenwood Cemetery,” said longtime Houston landscape architect Johnny Steele of Johnny Steele Design, who has designed cemetery plots for numerous families, including the late Texans owner Bob McNair. “I’m always working on something over there. Sometimes we go back to existing sites and modify them, and sometimes we enlarge them.”
In fact, when Steele, a Louisiana native, began his career here in 1977, his first job was designing a cemetery plot for a client, creating a layout with brickwork and greenery. Since then, his cemetery work has ranged from plots for two people to those that are meant to accommodate generations of an extended family in the equivalent of a small park.
As Steele created beautiful gardens for clients’ homes throughout the city, they often asked him to design their cemetery space when they reached an age that got them thinking of the final chapter of their lives.
The same is true for the landscape architects and crews at McDugald Steele, which through the years has designed up to 50 cemetery plots for clients. ( Johnny Steele is a former partner there.)
Steele and David Samuelson, a landscape architect at McDugald Steele, said that though there are other beautiful cemeteries in the Houston area, none allows the
elaborate, individualized plots that Glenwood does.
Low brick walls, called “coping,” or walkways in hilly areas mark where one plot begins and another ends. Marble and granite markers and statuary are other constants. Larger plots might even have gates made of bronze or iron, with family crests or patterns modeled after those found at owners’ homes.
You’ll find flowering crape myrtles, lush magnolia trees and old live oaks whose sprawling branches nearly touch the ground in older parts of the cemetery.
“More people doing more, that’s true,” said Dick Ambrus, executive director at Glenwood Cemetery. “They see their neighbors doing it, and they do it, too. People are anxious to make their area look good, and it makes Glenwood look very good.”
Filled with history
Glenwood Cemetery, 2525 Washington, was organized in
1871 and opened for business the following year as a garden cemetery, a pastoral setting viewed more as a park, with visitors bringing picnic lunches on weekends.
Back then, Glenwood Cemetery was on the outskirts of the city and Houston barely had 10,000 residents. It followed the new model for parklike cemeteries with curved roads, lots of trees and shrubs, ponds and even pavilions.
Its rolling slopes and shady trees made it one of the prettiest parts of our swampy city — the River Oaks of cemeteries, so to speak.
Ambrus has been executive director there for 38 years, watching some of the more elaborate plots take shape on his daily walks through the cemetery.
Single burial spaces — a 3-footby-10-foot patch of ground that will hold a single casket or three cremation urns — start at $8,500 and run as high as $50,000. That’s more than $1,600 per square foot for the choicest plots. Many, though, are much larger and designed to be more elaborate, two or three tiers with brick stairs and walkways, columbarium walls with niches for storing cremation urns, fences, sculptures and plantings.
Currently, the largest plot is 5,300 square feet, and there are a handful from 4,000 to 5,000 square feet.
After the land is bought, work to build walls, fences and landscaping can add $40,000 to $1 million to the cost of the dirt for those who want more than a plot of ground and headstone, Samuelson said.
“Location has value. Let’s say you’re sitting on a mountaintop looking over a lake — that’s where the value is,” Ambrus said. “Glenwood has the luxury of different heights, so we can differentiate pricing based on amenities. Not that the lower elevations aren’t beautiful; some are very beautiful and take advantage of the lake and skyline and city.”
Those buried there are a who’s who of city history, from Charlotte Allen to John Wortham. In between, there are well-known surnames Baker, Blaffer, Botts, Brown, Cullinan, Farish, Hobby, Rice, Sterling and Wiess. Architect John Staub, heart surgeon Dr. Denton Cooley, actress Gene Tierney Lee, wildcatter Glenn McCarthy and industrialist Howard Hughes — the most visited grave, according to Ambrus — are buried there, too.
Steele tells a story about Hughes’ grave. It seems that Hughes hired Staub — who primarily designed homes — to design his plot. Staub came back with a staid, traditional plan that Hughes rejected. His next plan, incorporating the biblical trumpets of Jericho along a curved wall, stuck. Hughes and his parents are all buried there.
In all, some 24,000 people have been buried in Glenwood’s 88 acres, and Ambrus said there currently are enough plots for the cemetery to last another 60 years. Through the years, Glenwood has bought adjacent land to expand, and more than 20 years ago incorporated another cemetery to the west, founded by the German Society of Houston.
In more recent years, Glenwood dug a lake, fed by Buffalo Bayou and Mother Nature, as a source of water for the cemetery’s irrigation system. Architects and designers also sometimes consider sustainability in materials, using more Cedar Bayou brick reclaimed from old buildings in South Houston and Galveston.
Statuary and sculpture, both new and old, can be found throughout, from marble angels perched on graves of beloved daughters and wives to bronze figures moved from backyards to the cemetery. The plots are more
Individual plans
Sue and Bill Whitfield envisioned their final resting place as a beautiful garden. With the help of friend Jeff Bradley, who has helped them with event planning for many years, and Samuelson at McDugald Steele, they evaluated their options.
They bought a tiered plot in the side of a hill, oversaw the fabrication of a Greco-Romanstyle granite sarcophagus and hand-selected Japanese blueberry trees that would be planted symmetrically on each side.
Bill Whitfield died in 2008 at the age of 80, and his coffin was placed into the crypt on their plot at Glenwood. When Sue died in early 2020, she was placed there, too. In the grounds around the sarcophagus, there’s room for Bradley and the couple’s four children, Bradley said.
“It was very important to Sue that if someone came to visit, they could sit on the bench behind the crypt, read the Scriptures and then look around down the hill and feel like they were in a park in nature rather than a cemetery,” Bradley said. “After Bill passed away, I would take Sue out there with regularity. We would have a sandwich from Nielsen’s (Deli) and sit on the bench and view the spot.”
Bradley visits the plot by himself now and said that someday his remains will likely be buried with his dear friends’.
An elaborate cemetery plot may seem like an extravagance, but the Whitfields were well-known philanthropists, too, serving on a variety of boards and donating to many nonprofits in the city. Sue Whitfield was part of the Fondren family — co-founders of what is now ExxonMobil — and her grandmother lived in the Montrose Boulevard mansion that now is the La Colombe d’Or Hotel.
When Cherie Lindley’s mother became ill, Cherie and her husband, John, started thinking about end-of-life issues. They drove through Glenwood and knew it would be a place where they could personalize their cemetery plot.
“I love a lot of things about Glenwood; it’s historical and it’s called the cemetery of angels,” Cherie Lindley said. “Our plot is fairly small, but it is going to be beautiful. We’ll have all white marble and an absent space with a cross.”
“I wanted a bigger garden with benches and another lot, but my husband said, ‘No, we could buy a house with the money we’re spending. Let’s stay with the one we have and give our money to people who need it,’ ” Cherie Lindley said of the cost of the land and improvements. “I love my smaller area.”