Calvary Church & Calvary House

Calvary’s work began in 1835, when a missionary clergyman and a few laymen went looking for a part of the growing city that no Episcopal congregation yet served. They found it near the House of Refuge, on the ground that is now Madison Square. North of 14th Street, Manhattan was still thinly settled: early parishioners remembered cattle pastures, running streams, a pond near 25th Street, and Sunfish Pond just north of Madison Square, where boys went to swim.

The parish was incorporated in 1836, and its first church stood on Fourth Avenue near 30th Street. Measuring forty-six feet by twenty-nine, it was built of wood, painted green, and framed so that it could be lifted off its basement and moved. Bishop Benjamin T. Onderdonk consecrated it on New Year’s Day, 1837. He defended its modest size: waiting for a grander building might have meant missing the chance to serve the people already there. “They did what they could.”

The people came more slowly than hoped. In November 1841, the vestry put the builders’ foresight to use and hired house-mover Benjamin Brown to haul the little church down Fourth Avenue. By December it stood on four lots at the northeast corner of 22nd Street, offered by Philip Kearny Jr., the future Civil War general. The move cost $900 in all. The United Charities Building stands on that corner today. Around the relocated church, the parish planted eighteen trees and laid a brick sidewalk.

The moving contract itself was $400, of which Ruggles contributed $100; the $900 figure covered the broader expense of the relocation. The journey down the avenue took twenty-five days. After Calvary outgrew the frame building, it was sold to the Tenth Presbyterian Church.

The move worked. Within months the vestry was reporting “an imperative demand for more pews” from families who could not get seats. The building was enlarged in 1842 and again in 1844, until it held more than 150 pews. It remained a painted frame church on a brick basement behind a pale fence. Samuel B. Ruggles, who had laid out Gramercy Park a decade earlier, served on the vestry during these years and returned to it a generation later, serving until his death in 1881.

Could that ground carry a much heavier stone church? The vestry tested the soil and doubted that a proper foundation could be built. In November 1845, the parish bought six lots one block south, at the northeast corner of Fourth Avenue and 21st Street. The address was sometimes written “21st and RailRoad,” for the tracks of the New York and Harlem Railroad ran along the avenue. The price was $19,000, almost all of it borrowed.

For an architect, the vestry turned to the young man whose Grace Church was then being finished half a mile away on Broadway. James Renwick Jr. was not yet thirty; the Smithsonian Institution Castle and St. Patrick’s Cathedral still lay ahead of him. Grace Church, in pale marble, was already his; Calvary would be its brownstone cousin.

Renwick was twenty-six when the commission began in early 1845. On December 8, the vestry approved a white-marble design; in February 1846, it changed the material to a light brownstone like that used at Richard Upjohn’s Church of the Holy Communion. Horace Butler’s masonry contract was $25,250.

The cornerstone was laid in March 1846. Horace Butler was the mason, and John Sniffen executed the woodwork, including the two tall wooden spires. Butler laid much of the brownstone on edge rather than with its natural grain running parallel to the ground. Over the decades the face-bedded stone shaled off in sheets, and patching it brought recurring trouble and expense—a familiar complaint to anyone who has cared for a nineteenth-century brownstone on these blocks.

Inside, the apparent weight of Gothic construction concealed lighter materials. Garmey describes plaster vaulting reinforced with horsehair and columns built around nine-by-nine-inch white-pine cores. A skylight with five windows admitted light above the five-sided apse.

The church was consecrated on Friday, June 4, 1847, by William Heathcote De Lancey, Bishop of Western New York. The parish preserved a small admission card to the service with a practical request printed at the bottom: “please to bring your prayer-book with you.” That summer the Evening Post admired “the new and splendid church of the Calvary just erected” and observed that it had already “drawn off some of the fashion from Grace Church.”

Splendor, however, had outrun the treasury. Forty men had subscribed $500 apiece for the choicest pews, leaving those seats exempt from annual rent and the parish with little continuing income. The unfinished rectory had to be signed over to its builder and rented back. Creditors were paid in pews: three went to Renwick himself. When rent on the gallery organ went unpaid, the church’s interest in the instrument was auctioned at a sheriff’s sale in December 1849, where a vestryman bought it in for ten dollars.

The rescue, in 1850, was distinctly of its time. Guided through the crisis by acting minister Jonathan Mayhew Wainwright, the original pew owners surrendered their deeds, and on October 31 every pew in the church was auctioned anew, with each former owner credited for the value of the pew he gave up.

To fill those pews and retire the debt, the vestry called the Reverend Dr. Francis Lister Hawks, one of the most celebrated preachers in the Episcopal Church. Under Hawks’s leadership, the parish regained its financial footing, bought the lot next door on Fourth Avenue in 1852, and bought back its rectory in 1854. Calvary had been saved, in large measure, by selling the right to sit in it.

The church that greeted Fourth Avenue in 1847 looked far taller than the building at the corner today. Renwick gave its western front two slender wooden spires rising above octagonal towers, with pointed openings, pinnacles, and Gothic tracery drawing the eye skyward. The May 1847 copyright print preserves a silhouette that announced Calvary well above the surrounding rooftops.

Garmey links the spires to Sulpice Boisserée’s 1821 engraving of Cologne Cathedral, an example of the printed architectural sources through which European Gothic designs reached American drawing rooms and architects’ offices.

Those spires lasted only thirteen years. By May 1860, the “wooden net-work above the towers” had weathered so badly that it had either to be reinforced at heavy cost or taken down. The vestry removed the spires, leaving the two shorter octagonal towers seen in Civil War–era stereographs and late nineteenth-century photographs.

Renwick returned to oversee their removal in September 1860. The lower octagonal stages survived that intervention, accounting for the two distinct stages in the church’s changing skyline.

That twin-towered silhouette appears in Childe Hassam’s 1893 winter canvas, Calvary Church in the Snow. Meanwhile, the parish continued to build alongside it. In 1867, a brownstone Gothic Sunday School building rose just north of the church on Fourth Avenue. Known today as the Renwick Gem, it later served as a gymnasium and parish dining hall and remains distinct from the much taller Calvary House around the corner on Gramercy Park North.

By the time Sam Shoemaker arrived as rector in 1925, the remaining octagonal towers had grown so rotten that pieces of timber occasionally blew down into the avenue, and the foundations could not support replacement towers of stone. In 1929, the vestry dismantled the towers, replacing them with the twin gables and small belfry seen on Park Avenue South today.

As Gramercy Park and the surrounding blocks filled with prominent New York families, Calvary’s parish register came to read like a directory of the nineteenth-century city. In December 1846—six months before the brownstone church was consecrated—John Jacob Astor III married Charlotte Augusta Gibbes in the parish. In December 1847, the funeral procession for former Chancellor James Kent, one of the nation’s foundational legal scholars, came to Calvary; diarist Philip Hone, serving as a pallbearer, recorded that hundreds of citizens, judges, and members of the bar accompanied the cortege as Rector Samuel Southard read the service.

On October 25, 1859, a young New York lawyer named Chester A. Arthur married Ellen Lewis Herndon at Calvary’s altar. Two decades later, in January 1880, Arthur returned to the church in grief for Ellen’s funeral—months before his nomination for Vice President. He was elected that November and became President in September 1881.

Look through the register of those decades and other familiar names appear: in May 1860, George B. McClellan married Ellen Marcy here on the eve of the Civil War; in April 1875, Alva Erskine Smith married William Kissam Vanderbilt in the church, decades before she became the suffrage leader and National Woman’s Party benefactor Alva Belmont.

On December 1, 1883, Elliott Bulloch Roosevelt married Anna Rebecca Hall at Calvary; their daughter, Eleanor Roosevelt, was baptized at the church in 1885 with her uncle Theodore Roosevelt among her godparents, and she continued to attend winter services here as an adult.

Calvary’s rectors also left a wide mark on the Episcopal Church. Jonathan Mayhew Wainwright steered the parish through its 1850 financial crisis before becoming Provisional Bishop of New York in 1852, and hymn writer Arthur Cleveland Coxe followed Francis Lister Hawks as rector in 1863 before leaving to become Bishop of Western New York in 1865.

Inside the brownstone rectory next door, the intellectual life of the parish ran just as deep. From 1865 to 1881, Calvary’s rector was the Reverend Dr. Edward Abiel Washburn, a Harvard-educated scholar and philologist of broad sympathies and formidable learning. Among the parish families were George Frederic and Lucretia Rhinelander Jones, whose young daughter, Edith, became the inseparable friend of the rector’s daughter, Emelyn Webster Washburn.

The Jones family’s ties to Gramercy went back before Edith’s birth. George Frederic, a Columbia College classmate of diarist George Templeton Strong, and Lucretia had lived for years on East 21st Street before moving to 14 West 23rd Street, where Edith was born in January 1862. In A Backward Glance (1934), she recalled her earliest childhood memory: a winter walk through Gramercy Park’s streets beside her tall, ruddy-cheeked father, her white-mittened hand tucked into his warm bare palm. Even in the coldest weather, he never wore gloves.

Renwick had designed that rectory in 1848–49 on original Park Lot 60, purchased from Trustee Thomas L. Wells and historically addressed as 103 East 21st Street. A May 1848 sketch shows the rear library bay. The building accounts specify durable locust-wood windowsills and a curving stair; the library received stained-glass skylights. Twenty boxed ailanthus trees and an iron fence added in 1852 brought further ornament outside. The fence’s flaming urns followed the example of the Brevoort family’s Fifth Avenue ironwork.

Garmey’s account follows Emelyn and Edith from the library to the roof: the girls read Old Norse beneath the colored skylights and climbed onto the flat roof to read Dante aloud. Those details give the lost rectory a place in Wharton’s literary education as well as in the parish’s architectural history.

At home, Edith’s mother treated her literary ambitions as an eccentric distraction; the girl had to beg for brown parcel-wrapping paper to spread on her bedroom floor and cover with verse. The rectory offered a more welcoming world. On cold afternoons in the 1870s, Edith and Emelyn curled up in oversized armchairs with Dr. Washburn’s books of Old Norse and Icelandic literature, teaching themselves Anglo-Saxon as they explored the sagas. In warmer weather, the roof of an adjoining building became their reading room.

Emelyn introduced young Edith Jones to Goethe, who remained her favorite writer, and when fifteen-year-old Edith secretly wrote her first novella, Fast and Loose, Emelyn was the one person allowed to read it. That childhood world stayed with the future novelist: Edith Wharton later drew on Calvary and Dr. Washburn for the church setting and the scholarly figure of Dr. Ashmore in her novel The Age of Innocence (1920), which received the Pulitzer Prize in 1921.

When thirty-one-year-old Samuel Moor Shoemaker Jr. arrived as rector in 1925, he found a parish whose ministry was outgrowing its nineteenth-century rooms. The old corner rectory had high ceilings, Gothic windows, and dark walnut woodwork, but it needed repairs. Shoemaker recalled a staff meeting in the rectory when someone suggested moving into the study; a few minutes after they walked out, a heavy section of ceiling crashed onto the very chair that person had just vacated.

The 1848–49 rectory was demolished in 1927. Its replacement carried the parish’s work upward on the same narrow site, while the separate 1867 Sunday School building remained north of the church on Fourth Avenue.

Selling its properties on East 22nd Street, the parish commissioned architect Woldemar H. Ritter to build on the narrow rectory lot at 61 Gramercy Park North. His nine-story brick-and-stone Calvary House gathered parish offices, assembly halls, interview rooms, and apartments for clergy and staff under a single roof, facing the trees of Gramercy Park while connecting directly to the church around the corner.

Bishop William T. Manning dedicated the main rooms on October 31, 1928, and two nights later the neighborhood was invited in for dinner. Inside, rooms for interviews and small gatherings were planned as welcoming, homelike places. A larger room beside Shoemaker’s study would host Sunday-afternoon tea. Groups would share rooms rather than claim them permanently, making it easier for clergy, parishioners, and neighbors to meet.

Calvary’s first pipe organ has outlasted its time in Manhattan. Installed in the rear gallery in 1847 by New York builders Davis & Ferris, the three-manual instrument was sold in 1888 to Round Lake, New York, where it still plays in the historic village auditorium. Much of its original pipework survives, preserving something of the sound that filled Renwick’s church when it was new.

One of the notable musicians to preside at that early console was English-born organist Henry Wellington Greatorex, who served during Francis Lister Hawks’s rectorship. His 1851 Collection of Sacred Music carried Calvary’s music across the country, and his setting of the Gloria Patri remains in hymnals today.

In 1886, the parish commissioned a new chancel organ from Frank Roosevelt. Electricity supplied by the Edison company ran its motor, retiring the paid organ-blower from the parish budget.

Ernest M. Skinner rebuilt the Roosevelt organ in 1907. For the parish’s centennial on April 24, 1936, Calvary signed an $18,500 contract with Aeolian-Skinner for a four-manual instrument, Opus 945, supervised by tonal director G. Donald Harrison. It retained fifteen stops from the Roosevelt organ.

Among the notable musicians to preside at the new console was organist and choirmaster Harold Friedell, who served two tenures at Calvary before becoming organist of St. Bartholomew’s on Park Avenue. A gifted composer of sacred music, Friedell wrote the enduring communion anthem “Draw Us in the Spirit’s Tether” (the hymn tune Union Seminary), still sung across the Episcopal Church.

In 1963, twenty-four-year-old organist and choirmaster Calvin Hampton arrived at Calvary and, over the next two decades, turned the nineteenth-century sanctuary into an unlikely late-night musical destination. Working with organ curator Randolph Gilberti, he expanded the four-manual organ into an instrument capable of formidable orchestral color.

Beginning in 1974, Hampton launched a free weekly recital series called “Fridays at Midnight.” At an hour when nearly every other sanctuary in Manhattan was locked and dark, listeners filled Calvary—often stretching out on the floor beneath dramatic lighting—for programs that ranged from Bach and Messiaen to Hampton’s own transcriptions.

Hampton’s own transcriptions of Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition and César Franck’s Symphony in D Minor brought the sweep of orchestral music into an organ recital. He also wrote for the wider concert stage—the New York Philharmonic performed his concerto for saxophone quartet, strings, and percussion in 1977—while composing enduring Episcopal hymn tunes for Sunday morning.

The midnight recitals continued until 1983, when Hampton stepped down from his Calvary posts. He kept composing while ill with AIDS and died in August 1984 at forty-five. Today his scores, recordings, and concert programs are preserved at the New York Public Library, carrying something of those midnight performances beyond the church.

The 1970s tested Manhattan’s historic Protestant churches with rising maintenance costs and shifting congregations. In 1976, Calvary joined forces with two other landmark nineteenth-century parishes: St. George’s Church on Stuyvesant Square and the Church of the Holy Communion at Sixth Avenue and 20th Street. Holy Communion was founded by the pioneering Episcopal priest, hymn writer, and social reformer the Rev. Dr. William Augustus Muhlenberg; its church was consecrated in 1846.

To retire the combined parish’s debts and sustain its ministry, Holy Communion was deconsecrated and sold to the drug-rehabilitation organization Odyssey House, which later sold the property to nightclub impresario Peter Gatien. He opened the Limelight there in 1983. Calvary and St. George’s continued together as the two active sanctuaries of Calvary–St. George’s Parish.

Leading the parish from 1975 to 2008, the Rev. Thomas F. Pike brought its preservation work to the wider city. He served on the New York City Landmarks Preservation Commission and became founding board chair of Partners for Sacred Places in 1989, an organization dedicated to helping historic houses of worship care for their buildings and the communities that rely on them.