Go 6 Floors Down, Then 6 Feet Under

Now, the funeral home will be torn down and resume operations in the new building -- minus the crematorium, which has been closed. There will be separate entrances on opposite corners of the building for condominium residents and funeral home visitors, and they will ride separate elevators and park on different levels of the garage. Construction of the building -- called the Club on Quincy because North Quincy is one of four streets surrounding it -- is expected to begin by early 2009.

The manager of Arlington Funeral Home declined last week to comment and forwarded e-mailed questions to the funeral home's owner, Houston-based Service Corporation International. Officials there did not respond to the questions.

Prices for the condominiums, which will feature upscale finishings and wood and marble flooring and will range from 950 to about 2,300 square feet, have not been determined, Grabner said.

Arlington Funeral Home was founded in 1956 by the late Raymond L. Morris, a longtime funeral director and a deacon of First Baptist Church in Clarendon (now the Church at Clarendon). In recent years, the area surrounding the funeral home on Fairfax Drive has grown more attractive to developers, and some residents and county officials think it should move to accommodate redevelopment.

"I think it's fair to say that although the funeral home is a valued business, from a planning perspective, there are better uses for that site than a funeral home,'' County Board Chairman Paul Ferguson (D) said. He called the current project "a good solution, although not the perfect one.''

Florida-based WCI, which bought the property surrounding the funeral home -- essentially the parking lot -- in 2005 and began redesigning the earlier condominium plan, also wanted the funeral home to move. Negotiations explored "a lot of different alternatives,'' Grabner said, including one in which WCI would buy another site where it could relocate.

But the funeral home wanted to stay. "They liked that location and didn't want to give it up,'' Grabner said.