Manhattanville - Historic Religious Institutions

Historic Religious Institutions

Four of Manhattanville’s houses of worship are among the most historically distinguished in all of Harlem. None is located in the area slated for the expansion of Columbia University.

St. Mary’s Protestant Episcopal Church on West 126th Street (formerly Lawrence Street), organized in 1823, was the only church in the district (indeed, in the entire Harlem territory with the exception of the Dutch Reformed Church on the East Side) in the second quarter of the nineteenth century. Its present stone building, built in 1908-1909 by T. E. Blake and the architectural firm of Carrere & Hastings, is the church’s second structure on same site of the church’s original wood frame structure, built in 1824 and consecrated in 1826. In 1831, St. Marys was the first church in the Episcopal Diocese to abolish pew rentals. The marble seal inlaid into the church porch of "Jacob Schieffelin's Vault", the burial vault in which Jacob Schieffelin and his wife Hannah Lawrence Schieffelin (who were the church's land donors as well as Manhattanville's principal founders) are interred, is clearly visible to passersby. Today St. Mary's is the oldest congregation in continuous service on its original site in the entire Harlem area. In 1998, the complex of church, its adjacent frame parish house (circa 1851) and brick school building (1890) were officially designated a New York City landmark.

Church of the Annunciation (Roman Catholic) on Covent Avenue and West 131st Street, founded in 1854, was the first Catholic church to be built on Manhattan’s west side above 2nd Street, and ministered particularly to the Irish Catholic laborers on the Hudson River Railroad. The Christian Brothers established the church building adjacent to Manhattan College, at 131st Street and the Bloomingdale Road (Old Broadway). The Brothers subsequently sold the adjoining church and rectory sites to John Hughes, the first Catholic Archbishop of New York. The present stone building, built in 1906-1907 by the architectural firm of Lynch & Orchard, is the church’s second structure, to which the congregation moved from two blocks east in 1907.

St. Joseph’s Roman Catholic Church, founded in 1860 as the Church of the Holy Family by Manhattanville’s German Catholic community at the northwest corner of 125th Street and Morningside Avenue (formerly Ninth Avenue). A 100th anniversary souvenir history in 1960 noted: “While the construction of the church was going on . . . on May 30, of the year 1861 was celebrated what was probably the first public Corpus Christi procession in New York City.” Manhattanville historian John J. Hopper mentions this church in his circa 1920 reminiscences as “the German Catholic Church at Ninth Avenue, which my father built” during his boyhood on Manhattan Street from 1853 to 1865. (Although the AIA guide attributes the church’s architecture to the Herter Brothers in 1889, the incorrect building date was probably confused that of the St. Joseph R.C. School building around the corner at 168 Morningside Avenue). David Dunlap cites this church in his book, “Glory in Gotham: Manhattan’s Houses of Worship,” as the oldest church in Harlem.

Old Broadway Synagogue, an Orthodox Jewish synagogue incorporated in 1911 under the name Chevra Talmud Torah Anshei Marovi, was built on Old Broadway (a rare vestige on Manhattan island of the Bloomingdale Road) by the architectural firm of Meisner & Uffner in 1923. The congregation formed from the mostly Ashkenazic Jewish population of Russian and Polish immigrants to New York during the 1880s who had made their way up to Central Harlem, then migrated to blocks west. The building is listed individually on the National Register of Historic Places.