Presbyterian Chapel
In the spring of 1832, Lewis Tappan and William Green rented the building. They offered it to the Presbyterian minister Charles Grandison Finney, a radical Abolitionist who converted it into the Free Presbyterian Chatham Street Chapel. In October 1832, the chapel was the site of the first national Sunday School convention in the United states. Over the next ten years, at first here, then from 1835-36 at the massive new Broadway Tabernacle, Finney gave sermons each Sunday to crowds as large as 3000 and led revivals three times a week. The Sacred Music Society, a popular religious choir, rented the building for two nights a week in this period at a cost of $850 a year. Philip Hone described his reaction to a performance in 1835:
| “ | astonished at the magnificence of the scene. The audience, of whom a large proportion were ladies, must have amounted to between 2000 and 3000 . . . . the chorus consisted of upwards of a hundred, the females all draped alike in white and arranged on opposite sides of the music gallery, formed an interesting and beautiful coup d'oeil. The ground floor, which is very capacious, and two large galleries were so crowded that I could scarcely find standing room behind the benches . . . . | ” |
In its later years, the church became a hotel. The building has since been demolished, and the land is now the site of a Metropolitan Correctional Center federal facility housing male and female pre-trial and holdover inmates, serving the Southern District of New York.
Read more about this topic: Chatham Garden Theatre
Famous quotes containing the words presbyterian and/or chapel:
“He is a Presbyterian first and an artist second, which is just as comfortable as trying to be a Presbyterian first and a chorus girl second.”
—H.L. (Henry Lewis)
“I went to the Garden of Love,
And saw what I never had seen:
A Chapel was built in the midst,
Where I used to play on the green.
And the gates of this Chapel were shut,
And ‘Thou shalt not’ writ over the door;”
—William Blake (1757–1827)