Transcript

As each new neighborhood in New York developed, religious properties were erected for the new residents. And if you can trace the earliest religious buildings to appear in a neighborhood, it will tell you a lot about the earliest residents.

And here what is probably the greatest of all surviving Romanesque revival churches in New York, is a congregation on Lenox Avenue and 122nd Street in Harlem built for Holy Trinity Episcopal Church by the prominent architect William Potter in 1887 to 1889.

Holy Trinity was one of a whole series of impressive Protestant churches that were erected in Harlem in the late nineteenth century, after the elevated railroad opened and Harlem becomes an affluent middle- and upper-middle-class community.

This remained Holy Trinity Episcopal Church until 1928 when the building burned. Holy Trinity moved to Inwood in northern Manhattan, and the Episcopal diocese took over this building and gave it to St. Martin's Episcopal Church, a congregation made up primarily of new West Indian immigrants.

So it went from being an all-white Episcopal church to being a black Episcopal church of West Indian immigrants in the 1920s, reflecting very clearly the changing character of the population of Harlem in the early twentieth century.

The history of church congregations also tells us a lot about how congregations moved north. This is St. Luke's Episcopal Church, which began in Greenwich Village on Hudson Street, and as its congregation moved away from Greenwich Village, which by the late nineteenth century was becoming increasingly an immigrant slum area, the church followed. And in the 1890s they commissioned a design from another prominent designer of the Romanesque revival, R. H. Robertson, for a new church that would be closer to its new neighborhood.

African American congregations also followed their congregations north. St. Philip's Church, the most prestigious African American church in New York, followed the migration of the City's black population north, up Manhattan Island, until it settled in 1910 in Harlem. It was one of the first buildings in New York to be designed by African American architects: Vertner Tandy, the first black architect in New York, and George Foster, one of the first two black architects registered in New Jersey, designed this Gothic revival building that's located on 134th Street.

The new African American congregations who followed their congregations into Harlem could only afford to buy sites on the mid-blocks. And so St. Philip's and Abyssinian Baptist and other old-line New York African American churches are on mid-block sites.

Synagogues also picked up on new design ideas in the late nineteenth century. In the 1870s, for the first time, synagogues begin to be designed so that they will look like synagogues, as in Temple Israel of Harlem, designed by Arnold Brunner, a very prominent Jewish architect in New York, who had also worked on the Spanish and Portuguese synagogue. And this, too, reflects changing neighborhoods, because it's right across the street from Holy Trinity Episcopal, and by the 1920s had become an African American church.