The Funeral Home to the Stars Gets Spruced Up

Good morning. It’s Thursday. We’ll find out why officials have been invited to a famous funeral home for something other than a funeral. We’ll also get details on a study that found that 1 in 4 New Yorkers can’t afford basics like housing and food.

The Frank E. Campbell funeral home on the Upper East Side has handled arrangements for celebrities as varied as John Lennon, Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, Biggie Smalls and Ivana Trump. Not to mention Logan Roy, the billionaire media mogul in the HBO series “Succession.”

A ceremony at Frank E. Campbell today will be different. There won’t be a casket. There will be an M.C., Elyse Delucci, a stand-up comedian and influencer. Cardinal Timothy Dolan, the Roman Catholic archbishop of New York, will be the keynote speaker. The ceremony will be an occasion for Frank E. Campbell to show off its $20 million renovation and take note of its long history. The funeral home was founded in 1898.

With celebrity names come crowds — after Judy Garland’s death in 1969, an estimated 20,000 people went into the funeral home for a glimpse of the body — and sometimes subterfuge. After John Lennon was shot to death in 1980, the staff at Frank E. Campbell arranged for a decoy hearse to pull up to the front entrance. The journalists who had camped out front gave chase when the hearse pulled away. Once they were gone, another hearse pulled up, and Lennon’s body was loaded in.

And in 1994, when Ms. Onassis died in her apartment a few blocks away on Fifth Avenue, an undertaker from Frank E. Campbell threaded his way through the crowds outside her building and embalmed the body in the apartment.

A funeral at Frank E. Campbell can be pricey. “Our services begin at $9,000,” William Villanova, its president, told me. Ivana Trump’s coffin cost a reported $125,000.

But Villanova is not one to talk about who Frank E. Campbell’s clients have been.

“Not something that we do,” he said.

“There have been times, speaking with people, when they have said, ‘What can you tell us about this funeral?’” Villanova said.

No comment, he said. “They’ll pick up their phone and show me a photo of me standing next to the principal mourner,” he said. “Even in that situation, I have no comment.”

Villanova will talk about how he was hired as a consultant for “Succession.” And about how he ended up appearing on camera, as a funeral director. “As we progressed, they asked me, ‘Would you act?’ I’d never done that before.”

He will also talk about the renovation. “We stayed open the entire time, which was not the easiest way to go about it,” he said.

But holding funerals in a construction site “was definitely the right decision.” The contractors stopped work when necessary.

The renovation did more than repaint and refinish. It was the first project “of this magnitude” in his lifetime, and he is 55. There were smaller projects to freshen things up, “but nothing as comprehensive and all-encompassing as this.”

Frank E. Campbell The Funeral Home, as it styles itself, has occupied its building on Madison Avenue since 1938, four years after Frank E. Campbell himself died. As my colleague Alex Vadukul wrote last year, Campbell had become a Barnum-like figure with a flair for stunts, like hiring an airplane to scatter someone’s ashes by the Statue of Liberty. His widow ran the operation until her death in 1954.

Villanova said the renovation had taken food service into account. Until early 2017, New York State did not allow funeral homes to serve food or beverages. Then came a law that said “incidental refreshments” could be served, along with nonalcoholic beverages — and caterers could handle the preparation. In the renovation, Frank E. Campbell added a lounge for catered receptions. The funeral home also has a formal dining room.

In the chapel on the first floor, pews that were firmly attached to the floor were taken out. Mourners now sit on what Villanova called “flexible seating” — chairs that can be moved as necessary. “We’re able to bring in round tables for a sit-down meal or high-top tables,” he said. “That really turns it into a venue space.”

Weather

Be prepared for showers, a cloudy sky and a high near 57. Tonight, expect a partly cloudy sky and a temperature near 40.

ALTERNATE-SIDE PARKING

In effect until Friday (Losar).

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Racketeering charges dismissed: A New Jersey judge ruled that there was no evidence that George Norcross III and several co-defendants had been involved in a conspiracy to obtain property along Camden’s waterfront illegally. Norcross was once one of New Jersey’s most powerful Democrats.
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1 in 4 New Yorkers can’t afford essentials

A quarter of New York City residents don’t have enough money for essentials like housing and food. Many say they cannot afford to go to the doctor.

Those findings come from a report that underscored the depth of the city’s affordability crisis.

The report, by a research group at Columbia University and the anti-poverty group Robin Hood, found that the share of New Yorkers in poverty was nearly double the national average in 2023 and had increased by seven percentage points in just two years.

The researchers used a different metric than the federal government did to measure poverty, taking into account income, noncash support like tax credits and the cost of living. Under that metric, the poverty threshold for a couple with two children in a rental household in New York City is now $47,190.

The study found that 58 percent of New Yorkers, or more than 4.8 million people, were in families with incomes below 200 percent of the poverty line — about $94,000 for a couple with two children or $44,000 for a single adult.

Poverty rates among Black, Latino and Asian residents were about twice as high as the rate for white residents, according to the report.

It also found that 26 percent of the children in New York City — about 420,000 — children, live in poverty.

Gov. Kathy Hochul and Mayor Eric Adams, who appear to recognize that disquiet about the high cost of living could threaten their political futures, have focused their agendas at least in part on persuading voters that they are trying to make New York more affordable.

It is a formidable challenge, said Richard Buery Jr., the chief executive of Robin Hood. The city “has so much wealth but also so much need,” he said.

Buery applauded several of the policy proposals in Hochul’s executive budget as a good start. She has called for cutting the state’s income tax for most residents, and she wants to give expectant mothers on public assistance a $100 monthly benefit during pregnancy, plus $1,200 for those mothers when their child is born.

Last year Adams proposed eliminating city income taxes for more than 400,000 of the lowest-wage earners. The City Council also passed a major housing plan known as “City of Yes,” which he had pressed for. It includes billions for the construction of affordable housing, as well as zoning incentives for larger buildings if developers include less expensive apartments.

METROPOLITAN diary

Tied up

Dear Diary:

I was running errands on an unseasonably warm October afternoon. As I approached the crowded corner of 23rd Street and Sixth Avenue, I heard someone calling out in earnest.

“Excuse me! Excuse me!” the voice said.

I turned to see a woman in running gear walking toward an older man who was holding a white cane.

“Sir,” the woman said urgently, “your shoelace is untied.”

She paused.

“Would you like me to tie it for you?” she asked.

The man did not hesitate.

“Sure!” he said.

The woman knelt down, tied his shoe and went on her way.

— Meghana Shah

Illustrated by Agnes Lee. Send submissions here and read more Metropolitan Diary here.

Glad we could get together here. See you tomorrow. — J.B.

P.S. Here’s today’s Mini Crossword and Spelling Bee. You can find all our puzzles here.