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 approximatel ...

and Reformed Church in America 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 most populous city in the United States. With a 2020 population of 8,804,190 distributed over , New York City is also the most densely populated major city in the Un ...

."The Collegiate Churches of New York City"
Reformed Church in America. The Gothic Revival 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 Louis Comfort Tiffany (February 18, 1848 – January 17, 1933) was an American artist and designer who worked in the decorative arts and is best known for his work in stained glass. He is the American artist most associated with the Art NouveauL ...

. 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 Fort ...

. 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"
''

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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 architecture, Greek Revival townhouse at 110 Second Avenue (Manhattan), Second Avenue between East 6th Street (Manhattan), 6th and 7th Street (Manhattan), 7th Streets in the East Village, Manhattan, ...

, 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 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 A declaration of independence or declaration of statehood or proclamation of independence is an assertion by a polity in a defined territory that it is independent and constitutes a state. Such places are usually declared from part or all of th ...

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 commer ...

, and other occasions, such as the death of King George VI in 1952.Slotkin, Jason (December 5, 2020
"Massive Fire Tears Through Historic Church Home To 'New York's Liberty Bell'"

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

Protestant Protestantism is a branch of Christianity that follows the theological tenets of the Protestant Reformation, a movement that began seeking to reform the Catholic Church from within in the 16th century against what its followers perceived to b ...

congregations in North America. 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 Isaiah Rogers (August 17, 1800 – April 13, 1869) was an American architect from Massachusetts who eventually moved his practice south, where he was based in Louisville, Kentucky, and Cincinnati, Ohio. He completed numerous designs for hotels, ...

-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 a ...

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 The West End Collegiate Church is a church on West End Avenue at 77th Street on Manhattan's Upper West Side. It is part of The Collegiate Reformed Protestant Dutch Church in the City of New York, the oldest Protestant church with a continuing o ...

(built 1892), located on the corner of

West End Avenue West or Occident is one of the four cardinal directions or points of the compass. It is the opposite direction from east and is the direction in which the Sun sets on the Earth. Etymology The word "west" is a Germanic word passed into some R ...

and 77th Street; Marble Collegiate Church, at Fifth Avenue and 29th Street; and the Fort Washington Collegiate Church, 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 The New York City Fire Department, officially the Fire Department of the City of New York (FDNY), is an American department of the government of New York City that provides fire protection services, technical rescue/special operations services, ...

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 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 identi ...

, 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