How one indie funeral home in Greenpoint is trying to repackage death

After two decades in video production, where her clients included fashion and cosmetics brands, Erica Hill did something radical in November 2021: She opened a funeral home in Greenpoint, Brooklyn.

It wasn’t just a career-180 for Hill; it was an unusual move, period. Funeral homes have been declining in numbers in New York and nationwide for decades.

“If you had told me 10 years ago that this is what I’d be doing, I’d tell you you were absolutely insane,” said Hill, one morning last month in her funeral home, called Sparrow.

“I have no interest in dying,” she said, “but I've had enough loss in my life that it's just unfortunately a reality and every single person on this earth is gonna die.”

Also, she said, she’s “very squeamish” around dead bodies.

And yet, there she was among the wood floors, skylights, and walls painted in various soothing shades of Pink Damask or Narragansett Green. The place smelled like pine, or like a boutique fitness class, thanks to the P.F. soy candles everywhere, which are for sale in the gift shop, along with chocolates, books on grief and artisanal urns.

And in the basement, four dead bodies were stored in a temperature-controlled room, awaiting their next and final move.

With Sparrow — which took over the space of the Stobierski-Lucas Gardenview Funeral Home — Hill is aiming big. She says she’s trying to elevate the funeral experience and make it a little better for the living, play a part in changing the conversation around death, and scale her concept across the country.

Hill can connect the dots between her previous career and her new one as a funeral home owner.

“I love telling stories and I’m a producer at heart,” Hill said. “I look at it now as I help families tell the story of their loved ones.”

Sparrow was not born in a vacuum. It arrived in Greenpoint amid several death trends led by women, including the death positivity movement, which is an attempt to encourage open and honest conversations about death. Women have driven the rise in death doulas and death influencers, and they are even graduating from funeral director programs at higher numbers than men, representing 72% of enrolled students in 2022 according to Robert Smith, the executive director of the American Board of Funeral Service Education.

In another room at Sparrow, a table was set up for the funeral of a 60-year-old woman. The family didn’t want a casket; instead they had arranged for her to be displayed on pillows, like a princess, amid an installation of cherry blossom trees.

“We allow them to bring their full selves here,” said Hill, noting that typically clients opt for caskets.

In New York, Hill is not legally allowed to handle bodies, or consult with families, because she is not a licensed funeral director. She said she won’t ever become one here, because of the embalming requirement at mortuary school.

Sparrow’s funeral director, Alexander Agard, runs day-to-day operations. He’s worked in the industry for more than a decade, in Manhattan, the Bronx and Brooklyn.

“Most funeral homes are literally stuck in 1972,” Agard said. “From the carpet to the drapery, to the scent to the dirty, decrepit bathrooms, to the mismatched furniture. You'll never have that here.”

Hill’s new approach to the death care industry may be a much-needed boost. Traditional brick-and-mortar funeral homes are, well, dying.

In 2022, just 11 new funeral homes opened in New York state, according to data from the Department of Health. That same year, 13 funeral homes closed. In the past 20 years, the number of funeral homes has shrunk 18% across New York, mirroring a national decline – even though more people are dying, according to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

“I don't think I've seen a new funeral home open in the state of Delaware in 10 years,” said Jack Schmidt of the National Directory of Morticians, which produces a guidebook of licensed funeral homes in the U.S., Mexico, Canada and elsewhere.

Hill’s interest in the funeral world was sparked years ago, after attending funerals for friends and feeling like the events weren’t what they would have chosen or wanted. But her ideas only became a reality after connecting with Jennifer Herman-Feldman, a fellow parent she’d known from when their children were in grade school together. Herman-Feldman read an early draft of her business plan and became an investor; today, they are business partners.

Hill sees her own mother’s death as a reminder of how funeral care should not go.

“The funeral home sent two young women to come pick up my mom and they stunk of smoke. They were really uncomfortable. One of them didn’t speak,” said Hill. “They didn’t do anything wrong, it was just so not what I would have wanted that experience to be.”

There are only so many legal and feasible ways to dispose of bodies in New York state, and the options at Sparrow are, for the most part, standard: cremations, funerals, memorials.

A funeral at Sparrow costs about $13,000; the national average is $7,848, according to the National Funeral Directors Association. Hill said Sparrow has worked on a sliding scale with families who could not otherwise afford their services, as part of her mission to be inclusive.

Sparrow also offers to produce an “exit party,” a celebration for someone who is living with a terminal illness, but so far no one has taken her up on it. This idea was lightly mocked in early news coverage of Sparrow. Hill understands the derision, but defends the concept.

“Everybody jokes about, I wonder who'd show up at my funeral?” she said. “Well, why wait for that? Like if your Aunt Sally's gonna fly across the country for your funeral, why not have your Aunt Sally come while you're still alive and spend a little time with you?”

The idea is also personal: Right before her friend Michelle MacNaught died in 2011 from ovarian cancer at age 21, Hill produced an art show of her works, which several hundred people attended.

“It was so clear how loved she felt, and how seen she felt, and she died the next morning,” said Hill, tearing up.

“When people are snarky about having a celebration before you die, I get it, it sounds weird,” said Hill. “But I really cannot stress how beautiful that was for her and for all of us.”

When Sparrow opened, one commenter on the Greenpointers’ Instagram called it “the Wing but for dead people,” referencing the women-only co-working space that had pastel tones, chichi furniture, and progressive branding, and closed in 2022 amid accusations of racism and a toxic workplace.

Both The Wing and Sparrow took something that few people think about joyfully – office space and death care – and tried to make it a little bit cooler.

“I’m not sure if that’s a compliment or an insult,” said Hill, when asked about the comparison.

But, she said, she could speak to the idea of “taking something that's existed for a really long time, looking at it in a different way and executing it in a different way.”

“I often talk about Soul Cycle,” she said. “Stationary cycling in a group existed at gyms before SoulCycle came along, but it wasn't sexy,” she said. “It’s no different than Sweetgreen,” she said. “Restaurants offered salad, but never in the way that they chose to repackage it.”

Beatrice Lewanduski, who has been a funeral director on Long Island for over 40 years, said the industry has evolved in recent decades.

“When I started in the business back in the ‘70s, the traditional funeral director was a man who wore black suits. We had three-day wakes. Everybody had a limousine. Everybody bought metal caskets, people wore black,” she said, adding that “everything was very sad.”

Now, she said, the typical consumer is “getting away from the mourning of a death to celebrating a person's life.” Things that were unheard of at funerals when she started — food, party favors — are commonplace.

She has not been to Sparrow, but said their offerings struck her as “services that today’s families are seeking.”

In April, Hill said Sparrow was on track to do 120 funerals for the year, though her goal is 150.

“What I have learned is, it takes a while for people to trust a funeral home because most people go to where their families have gone for the last however many years,” Hill said.

Earlier this year, she bought a second funeral home in Burbank, California, and is now eyeing a space in Manhattan. She has dreams to open a dozen more in the next three to five years, and is working on a deck to show investors. What keeps her up at night is “figuring out the best way to raise money to do what I want to do.”

“And then there's lots of nights where I'm not kept up at all,” she said. “Because I feel really solid about what I'm doing and excited.”

Correction: An earlier version of this story misstated Beatrice Lewanduski's role in the industry.