The Middle Collegiate Church is a dually aligned

United Church of Christ The United Church of Christ (UCC) is a mainline Protestant Christian denomination based in the United States, with historical and confessional roots in the Congregational, Calvinist, Lutheran, and Anabaptist traditions, and with approximately 4 ...

and

Reformed Church in America The Reformed Church in America (RCA) is a Mainline Protestant, mainline Reformed tradition, Reformed Protestant Christian denomination, denomination in Canada and the United States. It has about 152,317 members. From its beginning in 1628 unti ...

church located at 112 Second Avenue between 6th and

7th 7 (seven) is the natural number following 6 and preceding 8. It is the only prime number preceding a cube (algebra), cube. As an early prime number in the series of positive integers, the number seven has greatly symbolic associations in religion ...

Streets in the East Village 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 ...

."The Collegiate Churches of New York City"
Reformed Church in America. The

Gothic Revival Gothic Revival (also referred to as Victorian Gothic, neo-Gothic, or Gothick) is an architectural movement that began in the late 1740s in England. The movement gained momentum and expanded in the first half of the 19th century, as increasingly ...

church was built from 1891 to 1892 as the congregation's fourth location, and was designed by

Samuel B. Reed Samuel Burrage Reed was an American architect of Corona, New York, and Woodcliff Lake, New Jersey. He was active in mid-to-late nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century America, particularly in New York State, New York City, and Connecticut ...

. It featured stained-glass windows by Louis Comfort Tiffany. It is located within the

East Village/Lower East Side Historic District __NOTOC__ The East Village/Lower East Side Historic District in Lower Manhattan, New York City was created by the New York City Landmarks Preservation Commission on October 9, 2012.Brazee, Christopher D., et al"East Village/Lower East Side Hist ...

. It is part of the

Collegiate Reformed Protestant Dutch Church The Collegiate Reformed Protestant Dutch Church is a Dutch Reformed congregation in Manhattan, New York City, which has had a variety of church buildings and now exists in the form of four component bodies: the Marble, Middle, West End and For ...

. On December 5, 2020, the church was gutted by a fire that left only its stone exterior and its bell intact.Cramer, Maria and Sandoval, Edgar (December 5, 2020
"East Village Fire Damages 128-Year-Old Church"
''

The New York Times ''The New York Times'' (''the Times'', ''NYT'', or the Gray Lady) is a daily newspaper based in New York City with a worldwide readership reported in 2020 to comprise a declining 840,000 paid print subscribers, and a growing 6 million paid ...

Church building

The church was built in 1891 on a site directly north of the

Isaac T. Hopper House The Isaac T. Hopper House is a Greek Revival townhouse at 110 Second Avenue between East 6th and 7th Streets in the East Village neighborhood of Manhattan, New York City. Located just south of the New Middle Collegiate Church, it was built i ...

, and was designed by the architect S. B. Reed, "'thoroughly equipped' as one guide said, 'with reading-rooms, gymnasium, and all appliances for aggressive modern church work'." The

stained-glass Stained glass is coloured glass as a material or works created from it. Throughout its thousand-year history, the term has been applied almost exclusively to the windows of churches and other significant religious buildings. Although tradition ...

windows were of

Tiffany glass Tiffany glass refers to the many and varied types of glass developed and produced from 1878 to 1933 at the Tiffany Studios in New York City, by Louis Comfort Tiffany and a team of other designers, including Clara Driscoll, Agnes F. Northrop, an ...

. The church bell, moved to the current building in 1949, was cast in Amsterdam in 1729. It was known as "New York's Liberty Bell" because it was rung to celebrate the signing of the Declaration of Independence in 1776. It also marked the inaugurations and deaths of American presidents, remembrances of the

September 11th attacks The September 11 attacks, commonly known as 9/11, were four coordinated suicide terrorist attacks carried out by al-Qaeda against the United States on Tuesday, September 11, 2001. That morning, nineteen terrorists hijacked four commercial ...

, and other occasions, such as the death of

King George VI George VI (Albert Frederick Arthur George; 14 December 1895 – 6 February 1952) was King of the United Kingdom and the Dominions of the British Commonwealth from 11 December 1936 until his death in 1952. He was also the last Emperor of Ind ...

in 1952.Slotkin, Jason (December 5, 2020
"Massive Fire Tears Through Historic Church Home To 'New York's Liberty Bell'"
NPR The congregation is known for its activism.

Previous locations

The congregation was founded in 1628 in what was then the Dutch settlement of

New Amsterdam New Amsterdam ( nl, Nieuw Amsterdam, or ) was a 17th-century Dutch settlement established at the southern tip of Manhattan Island that served as the seat of the colonial government in New Netherland. The initial trading ''factory'' gave rise ...

, and the first Middle Church was built in 1731 on Nassau Street. It is one of the oldest continuous

Protestant Protestantism is a Christian denomination, branch of Christianity that follows the theological tenets of the Reformation, Protestant Reformation, a movement that began seeking to reform the Catholic Church from within in the 16th century agai ...

congregations in

North America North America is a continent in the Northern Hemisphere and almost entirely within the Western Hemisphere. It is bordered to the north by the Arctic Ocean, to the east by the Atlantic Ocean, to the southeast by South America and the Car ...

. During the

American Revolutionary War The American Revolutionary War (April 19, 1775 – September 3, 1783), also known as the Revolutionary War or American War of Independence, was a major war of the American Revolution. Widely considered as the war that secured the independence of t ...

, when the British occupied New York, the Nassau Street building was used as a prison, a hospital, and a riding school. After the war it was converted back to a church, but became the city's main post office in 1844, a role it played for over 30 years. Meanwhile, the congregation built another sanctuary on Lafayette Place from 1836 to 1839. Called the Second Middle Collegiate Church, or the Lafayette Place Middle Dutch Church, it was an Isaiah Rogers-designed

Greek Revival The Greek Revival was an architectural movement which began in the middle of the 18th century but which particularly flourished in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, predominantly in northern Europe and the United States and Canada, but ...

building with a spire, an unusual combination which provoked the remark that the spire was there to Christianize the pagan building below it. The congregation abandoned the building in 1887, and it was razed, but not before the bell was moved to the Collegiate Church of St. Nicholas. It returned to the Middle Collegiate Church – by now at Second Avenue – when St. Nicholas was demolished in December 1949. Other existing churches tracing their congregational founding to the same first

of 1628 include West End Collegiate Church (built 1892), located on the corner of West End Avenue and 77th Street;

Marble Collegiate Church The Marble Collegiate Church, founded in 1628, is one of the oldest continuous Protestant congregations in North America. The congregation, which is part of two denominations in the Reformed tradition—the United Church of Christ and the Reform ...

, at

Fifth Avenue Fifth Avenue is a major and prominent thoroughfare in the borough of Manhattan in New York City. It stretches north from Washington Square Park in Greenwich Village to West 143rd Street in Harlem. It is one of the most expensive shopping stre ...

and 29th Street; and the

Fort Washington Collegiate Church Fort Washington Collegiate Church is a Collegiate Reformed Protestant Dutch Church located at Magaw Place and 181st Street in the Washington Heights neighborhood of Manhattan, New York City. The congregation's Country Gothic style building ...

, at Magaw Place and 181st Street. All are part of the Reformed Church in America.

Fire

On December 5, 2020, a six-alarm fire spread from an adjacent vacant building, engulfed the church structure, and left intact only the exterior stone walls. The fire, accidentally caused by electrical wiring, took nearly eight hours to extinguish. The church roof collapsed, the Tiffany windows were blown out, and the sanctuary was destroyed. Only the "Liberty Bell" and the exterior survived, including the tower in which the bell hung. A senior minister of the church described the aftermath as "a gutted building full of smoke". New York City Fire Department Assistant Chief John Hodgens described the church and the adjacent building as "total losses", and their structural stability was being evaluated by engineers in the wake of the blaze. The fate of the church building was initially unclear, but the ministry will continue, and fundraising to rebuild commenced. Mayor

Bill de Blasio Bill de Blasio (; born Warren Wilhelm Jr., May 8, 1961; later Warren de Blasio-Wilhelm) is an American politician who served as the 109th mayor of New York City from 2014 to 2021. A member of the Democratic Party, he held the office of New Yor ...

pledged the city's assistance with rebuilding. Services had been conducted online since March 2020 because of the

COVID-19 pandemic The COVID-19 pandemic, also known as the coronavirus pandemic, is an ongoing global pandemic of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) caused by severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2). The novel virus was first identif ...

, and continued after the blaze. The church was insured for fire, and received about $500,000 in donations by Christmas 2020, but the funds were still "nowhere close to what's needed for rebuilding".

References

External links

*
Official website
{{DEFAULTSORT:New Middle Dutch Church (New York City) Churches completed in 1891 19th-century Protestant churches Churches in Manhattan Gothic Revival church buildings in New York City Religious organizations established in 1628 17th-century Calvinist and Reformed churches Former Dutch Reformed churches in New York (state) Reformed Church in America churches East Village, Manhattan 1628 establishments in the Dutch Empire Building and structure fires in New York City Church fires in the United States Second Avenue (Manhattan) Building collapses in 2020 Building collapses in the United States Building collapses caused by fire 2020 fires in the United States