Building
The church building is located at 54–57 Washington Square South. In addition to La Farge's stained-glass windows and Saint-Guadens's marble frieze, it features Italian Renaissance influences wedded to a basic Italianate form, and has notable examples of scagliola, a very convincing handcrafted imitation of marble made of highly polished pigmented plaster. Overall, the exterior and shape of the building is said to resemble the Basilica di Santa Maria Maggiore in Rome, Italy, while the entrance is said to be inspired by the Renaissance church San Alessandro, built in Lucca, Italy, in 1480. The fourteen stained glass windows in the church's main sanctuary are the largest collection of major LaFarge windows in any one place in the U.S.
The campanile tower, located at 51–54 Washington Square South to the west of the church itself, was built in 1895–96, after the sanctuary had been completed, and was designed by the firm of McKim, Mead & White. The adjacent Hall, however, predates the church, having been built in 1877, and was designed by John G. Prague.
In 1999, facing financial difficulties, the church's board of trustees sold the Judson House, the parish building behind the church, to New York University School of Law, which used the site for its new Furman Hall. At eleven stories tall, the new building now towers over the church and Washington Square Park beyond, causing considerable controversy in the community at the time of its construction. The church's offices and a small assembly hall now occupy a condominium suite in one corner of the new building, adjacent to the main church, at 239 Thompson Street.
From 1990 to 2006, the church building was repainted, repainted, reroofed; the stained glass windows were cleaned and reinstalled by Cummings Studio; an elevator was installed to make the building accessible and air conditioning was added. These projects exhausted all the proceeds from the sale of the back lots, plus approximately $1 million additional, raised from contributions of arts patrons and the congregation.
Read more about this topic: Judson Memorial Church
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—Fanny Burney (1752–1840)
“People do not know the natural infirmity of their mind: it does nothing but ferret and quest, and keeps incessantly whirling around, building up and becoming entangled in its own work, like our silkworms, and is suffocated in it: a mouse in a pitch barrel.”
—Michel de Montaigne (1533–1592)
“Notice how he has numbered the blue veins
in my breast. Moreover there are ten freckles.
Now he goes left. Now he goes right.
He is building a city, a city of flesh.
He’s an industrialist.”
—Anne Sexton (1928–1974)