The Church of the Holy Apostles is an Episcopal parish located at 296 Ninth Avenue at 28th Street in the

Chelsea Chelsea or Chelsey may refer to: Places Australia * Chelsea, Victoria Canada * Chelsea, Nova Scotia * Chelsea, Quebec United Kingdom * Chelsea, London, an area of London, bounded to the south by the River Thames ** Chelsea (UK Parliament consti ...

neighborhood of

Manhattan Manhattan (), known regionally as the City, is the most densely populated and geographically smallest of the five boroughs of New York City. The borough is also coextensive with New York County, one of the original counties of the U.S. state ...

New York City New York, often called New York City or NYC, is the List of United States cities by population, most populous city in the United States. With a 2020 population of 8,804,190 distributed over , New York City is also the L ...

. Its historic church building was built from 1845 to 1848,, p.72 and was designed by New York architect

Minard Lafever Minard Lafever (1798–1854) was an American architect of churches and houses in the United States in the early nineteenth century. Life and career Lafever began life as a carpenter around 1820. At this period in the United States there were no ...

. The geometric stained-glass windows were designed by

William Jay Bolton William Jay Bolton (31 August 1816 – 28 May 1884) was the first artist in the United States to design and manufacture figural stained glass windows.Clark, p. 40 ''Bolton was now prepared to undertake a larger project, an impressive array ...

. The church faces

Chelsea Park Chelsea Park is a park in the Chelsea neighborhood of Manhattan, New York City, that dates back to 1910. The park has sports fields, basketball and handball courts, a children's playground and space for sitting. The surface is mostly tarmac or ...

across 9th Avenue. The building is a

New York City landmark The New York City Landmarks Preservation Commission (LPC) is the New York City agency charged with administering the city's Landmarks Preservation Law. The LPC is responsible for protecting New York City's architecturally, historically, and cu ...

and on the

National Register of Historic Places The National Register of Historic Places (NRHP) is the United States federal government's official list of districts, sites, buildings, structures and objects deemed worthy of preservation for their historical significance or "great artistic v ...

. In 2020, it reported 115 members, average attendance of 86, and $239,257 in plate and pledge income.

History

The Holy Apostles congregation "was founded in 1844 as the result of an outreach by Trinity Church to immigrants who worked on the Hudson River waterfront to the west of the Church’s location in the Chelsea section of Manhattan", evolving out of a Sunday school., pp.98-99 Construction on the sanctuary began in 1845 and continued through 1848, although Lafever enlarged the building by 25 feet by adding a

chancel In church architecture, the chancel is the space around the altar, including the choir and the sanctuary (sometimes called the presbytery), at the liturgical east end of a traditional Christian church building. It may terminate in an apse. Ove ...

in 1853–54. In 1858 the congregation needed to expand, so architect Charles Babcock of the firm of Richard Upjohn & Son enlarged the building into a cross-shaped sanctuary with the addition of

transepts A transept (with two semitransepts) is a transverse part of any building, which lies across the main body of the building. In cruciform churches, a transept is an area set crosswise to the nave in a cruciform ("cross-shaped") building withi ...

. The church, the only one that Lafever designed which remains extant in Manhattan, is also one of the very few there of Italianate design, although the church has also been described as an early example of

Romanesque Revival architecture Romanesque Revival (or Neo-Romanesque) is a style of building employed beginning in the mid-19th century inspired by the 11th- and 12th-century Romanesque architecture. Unlike the historic Romanesque style, Romanesque Revival buildings tended to ...

., pp. 188-189 The vestry is in "pure Tuscan" style.Hamlin, Talbot. "The Rise of Eclecticism in New York", ''Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians'', Vol. 11, No. 2 (May, 1952), pp. 3-8 Lafever's sanctuary was a three-aisled

basilica In Ancient Roman architecture, a basilica is a large public building with multiple functions, typically built alongside the town's forum. The basilica was in the Latin West equivalent to a stoa in the Greek East. The building gave its name ...

. The ceiling was vaulted with plaster groins "small in scale but beautiful in proportion." Original Lafever touches in the details include the

corbel In architecture, a corbel is a structural piece of stone, wood or metal jutting from a wall to carry a superincumbent weight, a type of bracket. A corbel is a solid piece of material in the wall, whereas a console is a piece applied to the s ...

s from which the ribs spring. The church's congregation has always been a socially active one. It is rumored that the church was a stop on the

Underground Railroad The Underground Railroad was a network of clandestine routes and safe houses established in the United States during the early- to mid-19th century. It was used by enslaved African Americans primarily to escape into free states and Canada. T ...

during the

American Civil War The American Civil War (April 12, 1861 – May 26, 1865; also known by other names) was a civil war in the United States. It was fought between the Union ("the North") and the Confederacy ("the South"), the latter formed by states th ...

. In the 1970s, the church was instrumental in the foundation of

Congregation Beit Simchat Torah Congregation Beit Simchat Torah ("CBST") is a synagogue located in Manhattan, New York City. It was founded in 1973, and is the world's largest LGBT synagogue. CBST serves Jews of all sexual orientations and gender identities, their families, ...

, a synagogue for gays and lesbians begun by Jacob Gubbay. It hosted the congregation from 1973 to 1975, and again from December 1998 until it found a permanent home in April 2016. In that same decade, Holy Apostles hosted the

ordination Ordination is the process by which individuals are Consecration, consecrated, that is, set apart and elevated from the laity class to the clergy, who are thus then authorization, authorized (usually by the religious denomination, denominational ...

of the first woman priest (and openly lesbian) in the New York diocese, Rev. Ellen Barrett. In 1982, the congregation began the

Holy Apostles Soup Kitchen Holy Apostles Soup Kitchen (HASK) is an emergency feeding program of the Church of the Holy Apostles, located in the Chelsea section of Manhattan. HASK provides hot meals as well as counseling and referrals services citizens of New York City. Missi ...

, which continues to serve the indigent of the area. The Church of the Holy Apostles is located in

Penn South Penn South, officially known as Mutual Redevelopment Houses and formerly Penn Station South, is a limited-equity
on the ...

, a housing cooperative. During the construction of Penn South in 1959, builders considered demolishing the church to make way for Penn South. Ultimately, four churches on the site, including the Church of the Holy Apostles, were saved. The UHF's president,

Abraham Kazan Abraham E. Kazan (1889–1971) is considered the "father of U.S. cooperative housing". Biography Abraham Kazan was born in 1889. Growing up as an eyewitness to appalling tenement conditions, Kazan believed that housing was a vital obstacle for t ...

, later called the preservation a "mistake" because it had prevented Penn South from being developed earlier. The sanctuary was badly damaged in 1990 by a fire, in which some of the stained-glass windows were lost, but most survived without serious damage. A restoration began almost immediately, and was completed in 1994 under the supervision of Ed Kamper, without interruption of the social services the church provides. The Church of the Holy Apostles was designated a

in 1966, and was added to the

in 1972. "Hungry Minds," an extensive profile in ''

The New Yorker ''The New Yorker'' is an American weekly magazine featuring journalism, commentary, criticism, essays, fiction, satire, cartoons, and poetry. Founded as a weekly in 1925, the magazine is published 47 times annually, with five of these issues ...

'''s May 26, 2008, issue, gives an account of the church's history with special attention given to the soup kitchen and the writing workshop that Frazier and others conducted there.

References

External links

* * {{National Register of Historic Places in New York Churches in Manhattan New York City Designated Landmarks in Manhattan Properties of religious function on the National Register of Historic Places in Manhattan Episcopal church buildings in New York City Italianate architecture in New York City Churches completed in 1846 19th-century Episcopal church buildings Romanesque Revival church buildings in New York City

Church of the Holy Apostles The Church of the Holy Apostles ( el, , ''Agioi Apostoloi''; tr, Havariyyun Kilisesi), also known as the ''Imperial Polyándreion'' (imperial cemetery), was a Byzantine Eastern Orthodox church in Constantinople, capital of the Eastern Roman E ...

Chelsea, Manhattan Underground Railroad in New York (state) African-American history in New York City Italianate church buildings in the United States

History

See also

References

External links