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.