Bolton Hill lost two grande dames in April. Over many years they separately brought to the neighborhood originality, community spirit and energy that helped make Bolton Hill the unique place that it is. Read about Susan Van Buren and Debby Phinney:
SUSAN VAN BUREN
March 2, 1948 – April 15, 2026
Susan Van Buren, graphic designer turned landscape architect, devoted friend of children, animals, and the environment and steward of an extraordinary Bolton Hill garden, died on April 15 at home, surrounded by her family.
“Susan made an extraordinary contribution to our neighborhood – for her work to keep Bolton Hill’s architecture and décor consistent with its history, as part of CHAP and BHCA’s Architecture Committee work. She was also a committed gardener who provided beauty for all of us to enjoy both in her own garden, often opened to neighborhood events, and for her work in public spaces. We’ll really miss her,” said BHCA’s president, Lee Tawney.
She was born Susan Amelia Hunley on March 2, 1948, in Evansville, Indiana, the second of four children of Dr. Theodore Roosevelt Hunley — Ted, a Navy dentist who later taught at Georgetown and Indiana University — and Amelia Royer Hunley, known as Mim, a teacher who orchestrated home and family with a steady competence that rarely gets the credit due. Ted’s career moved them around the country, with each posting adding another layer to a child devoted to books, gardens, history, and fishing with her father. From her mother she learned to sew, with the same precision she brought to everything else.
Susan graduated from high school in Bethesda, having heard Martin Luther King speak at the March on Washington in 1963. Her early commitment to social justice ran through everything that followed: a year at Middlebury as part of its first class of women, then at George Washington University, where she studied art history, architecture, and life sciences, and was active in participation in the civil rights, peace, and women’s movements throughout.
Her professional life had three distinct acts: as a graphic designer, freelancing for ABC World News Tonight before joining Good Morning America, rising at 3AM to help produce the morning news, and then home after school for her daughters. She pivoted toward landscape architecture and a master’s from the Conway School of Landscape Design in Massachusetts, where she met Peter Van Buren on the first day of class. They married in August 1986.
Over the next 25 years she directed land stewardship at the Accokeek Foundation, shaped policy with Maryland’s Smart Growth Commission, and led the Cylburn Arboretum Association, before a final act as co-owner of TerraLogos, a green energy group she and Peter led until retirement in 2013.
In the early 1970s, she and her young family lived in Loudoun County, VA. She taught at Waterford Montessori School and helped run a nature camp for kids. Their homesteads attracted a menagerie of cats, dogs, chickens, possums, baby quail, a couple of steers and the occasional horse. She was once bitten by a copperhead while gathering plant specimens on a sunny slope near Catoctin Creek [in Dr. Scholl’s…], leading to the discovery of a horse serum allergy and different choices in footwear.
The Van Burens moved to Bolton Hill in 1988. In 2020 they moved to a new home on Park Avenue where they became stewards of a spectacular garden. She loved having Bolton Hill Nursery School as a neighbor, and planted a special side garden just so she could talk to the little kids.
An accomplished photographer, illustrator and draftsperson, she saw the visual world with a practiced eye, whether behind a camera or at a drawing board. She and Peter had a special love for Italy, where their daughter Melissa lived for many years. She read widely and remained genuinely curious about the world until the very end. She was specific in her tastes and generous with them.
Susan donated her body to science at the Maryland Anatomy Board.
She leaves behind her husband Peter; daughters Adrienne (Nick; Bristol, UK) and Melissa (Brooklyn, NY); grandchildren Isobel (Lewis), Flavia, and Nilo, rooted, as she appreciated, across three countries; her siblings Pat (Louisville, KY), Mary Jane (Flat Rock, NC; John), and David (Furlong, PA; Colraine); her sister- and brother-in-law Sally and Bob; and many nieces and nephews. The family is grateful for the support of Gilchrist Hospice, Ella Stewart Care, the extraordinary Bolton Hill community, and her extensive network of friends. A memorial celebration will take place in September.
–Adrienne Noonan, with input from Peter and the rest of the Van Buren family.
DEBORAH PHINNEY
July 4, 1934 — April 13, 2026
Many people in Bolton Hill likely knew Debby Phinney longer and better than I did. She was a music teacher, a creator of hilarious Bolton Hill musical reviews, a composer. She and her husband, Ralph, raised two children near where I live. I’m sharing my memories of her as just one tile in the great mosaic of her life in Bolton Hill.
I hope her friends have seen the warm obituary tributes to her posted on the website of the Cremation Society of Maryland or published in the Sun by Jacques Kelly. I can’t resist attaching a portrait in words, which appeared in the Sun in 1972. The photo in flapper attire is worth a thousand thousand words.
I moved to Bolton Street in 2016. One of the first neighbors to welcome me was a cheerful, energetic lady, clearly smart as a whip, who worried that I was parking my sports car on the street. I explained that my garage was temporarily full of furnishings meant for the garden. I had lived in and loved Charles Village for 20 years but had no neighbors who would have expressed such a concern. This total stranger hadn’t hesitated. I thanked her for worrying.
A day or two later I noticed a city street sign on our block, “Lollipop Lane” – English village or Oz? Someone explained to me that, many years before, a kind lady passed out lollipops to children taking a shortcut down the alley on their way to school. Debby invited me to a longstanding neighborhood tradition –a potluck in the alley, where she and Ralph set up tables with paper plates, plastic forks and knives, and a large pitcher of whiskey sours. Neighbors materialized bearing plates of deviled eggs, fried chicken, potato salad, stuffed grape leaves, oatmeal cookies … not Oz, I thought, but Eden.
For then on, I looked forward to finding a mimeographed Lollipop Lane invitation under my door. I went as often as I could, cheap Chianti in hand. Occasionally I saw Debby on her delivery rounds, looking very busy and slightly wicked. I gathered that not every house got an invitation. Almost all the invitees lived within a block of the Lane. I hadn’t yet realized that every Bolton Hill micro-climate has its own potlucks, nights out, stoop parties, so I thought of Lollipop Lane as an exclusive secret society or speak-easy. I was flattered to be part of it.
My grandmother Newny, a legendary party girl in her time and an actual flapper when young, used to say, “If the host has a good time, everyone has a good time.” Debby channeled Newny in Lollipop Lane: funny, high-spirited, and always having the time of her life.
Sometime before the pandemic, Debby passed her invitation list to me. We weren’t close friends, but I was honored that she thought I might take up the torch; it felt like being knighted. Her list was mostly handwritten, with erasures and scratch-outs and additions in different inks, with arrows pointing this way and that; names and street addresses. With her permission I started the transition to invitations via email. I also asked if people might enjoy hosting indoors, in their homes, so that the parties could continue year ‘round. I expanded the list to include friends from blocks away. We got to explore each other’s houses, keeping host duties quite light.
There were several wonderful gatherings before COVID intervened. By the time that cloud lifted, the Phinneys were gone from Bolton Hill. Debby was able to attend at least once, recently widowed and living at Springwell Senior Living Community. She was greeted with joy from neighbors whose memories of her stretched back decades.
I remember her positivity about her new life: “There are a lot of widows there, so we share that.” No self-pity, but the resilience of a true trouper: “The show must go on.” I was proud to know her, and I miss her.
–John McLucas
