Urban Uplift: Sanctuaries for the Spirit By HOLLAND COTTER

December 25, 2009
ART
Urban Uplift: Sanctuaries for the Spirit By HOLLAND COTTER
Manhattan is an island of churches. No matter where you are, you’re never far from the sight of one, whether a magisterially carved stone or a basic stucco-and-brick. True, the days are gone when the city’s churches were routinely accessible to street traffic, though most will be open for Christmas services on Friday and into the weekend.

What’s constant is that churches remain a special category of real estate, set-aside zones dedicated to the proposition that all of us, praying types or not, need quiet places to be alone in public, places to think, feel and see things we may not think, feel and see elsewhere.

I can map much of my history in the city by the churches that figured into it. When I made holiday visits to New York as a kid in the late 1950s, Midtown Fifth Avenue was the big draw: F. A. O. Schwarz, the old Scribner’s, Rockefeller Center, Saks with its windows, and, in the middle of everything, St. Patrick’s Cathedral, where you could sit for as long as you wanted.

Was the cathedral as mobbed then as it is now with herds of tourists pushing in and out? Memory says no; art says yes. I tend to remember the scene as it looks in the more sedate pictures from Donald Blumberg’s 1965 photographic series “In Front of St. Patrick’s Cathedral,” with men and women in skinny striped ties and pillbox hats lingering on the steps before heading off to Bonwit’s and brunch.

But other pictures from the series, which is on view through Feb. 20 at Keith de Lellis Gallery on the Upper East Side, are probably more like it: blurry, out-of-focus images — as if someone kept bumping Mr. Blumberg’s elbow as he shot — of crowds in shirtsleeves and shorts emerging from the cathedral, the fanny-packers and cellphone wielders of yesterday.

When I moved to New York in the early ’70s, I lived briefly on East 76th Street near Third Avenue. It wasn’t a neighborhood of architectural distinction, but it yielded at least one impressive sight: St. Jean Baptiste Catholic Church on 76th and Lexington Avenue, a neo-Baroque block of gray stone. Looming like a cliff face over the street, it looked like solid mass with no interior, so I never went in.

I had no idea that it started as a parish church for 19th-century French-Canadian immigrants, or that its congregation had first worshiped in a Yorkville stable loft, or that the church housed a much-revered relic believed to bestow miraculous cures. To me it was just a big, strange fixture I passed to get to the subway. Now, in that funny way memory works, it’s become a landmark of a phase of my life. I finally dropped in a few days ago, by the way. It’s lovely and warm inside.

Lower Manhattan

In 1974 a church was my introduction to Lower Manhattan, where I lived for several years. On my first trip to Wall Street I came out of the subway near the New York Stock Exchange and looked up to see Trinity Church, like some vision from an earlier age, at the top of the street. The image of Trinity’s oldness surrounded by so much newness, of spiritual power surrounded by material power, instantly shaped my view of that neighborhood and still does, though there have been many changes there since.

One of those changes was the loss of a church, a different one. St. Nicholas Greek Orthodox Church, distinctly unmonumental at four stories tall, stood a few blocks from where I lived just south of the World Trade Center. I loved the church’s Old World savor, with its gilded icons and candelabra. I loved that its long-dispersed congregation returned, a devout little band, every Easter. I loved the sight of its silhouette, tiny, against the steel mass of the south tower. When that tower fell on 9/11, St. Nicholas was ground to dust.

The Village

Many of the oldest churches in New York have followed the growth of the city, starting downtown and in slow stages relocating uptown, which is more or less the route I’ve taken.

In the early ’80s I went from Wall Street to Chinatown, where I lived in a sublet over a Buddhist temple, then on to the East Village, which by the mid-’80s was a hot spot for new art.

To me it always had been. And much of that art was associated with churches. Judson Memorial Church, on Washington Square South, dated from the late 19th century and was progressive from the start, delivering food and medicine to immigrants along with the Gospel. And its wealthy benefactors made sure the church looked good, with windows by John La Farge and sculptures by Augustus Saint-Gaudens.

When funds later dropped off, Judson’s art became more radical. In the ’60s the church was a center for political activism and experimental performance-based work. It hosted the early Happenings and, under the name of the Judson Dance Theater, helped invent postmodern dance with the work of Yvonne Rainer, Lucinda Childs and Simone Forti.

“The two great doctrines of Christianity are salvation and creation. There has been much concern about the first. Judson wants to do more about the second.” So said Al Carmines, the minister and composer who led the Judson arts programs. He was talking about art as a spiritual experience. In the early 1980s Bread and Puppet Theater presented its “Washerwoman Nativity” in the church in the weeks before Christmas. And when, with a tinkling of chimes, the figure of a tall angel suddenly rose in the darkened sanctuary, the effect was breathtaking and heartbreaking.

During the same period, St. Mark’s Church, on Second Avenue in the East Village, was the church of choice for poetry. The church itself is venerable. Completed in 1799 and the second oldest in Manhattan, it is on the site of Peter Stuyvesant’s family chapel. By contrast, the surrounding neighborhood was a seedbed for the cultural underground and a natural setting for the Poetry Project at St. Mark’s Church, which promoted new work in new styles, transformed the solitary poet into a congregation of poets, and continues its work today as an organization run by poets for poets.

If the Poetry Project’s readings get raucous, as they sometimes do, the East Village offers yet another church alternative, the Fifteenth Street Meeting House at Rutherford Place, a Quaker place of worship and the soul of quietude. Its interior is as plain as a Donald Judd wood box: clean lines, dove-gray walls, no altar, seats on four sides. It looks like a Minimalist conversation pit, which in a sense it is. Worshipers gather; speak when they are moved to. Often their words are poetry that doesn’t use the name.

Midtown

If you thrive on a different spiritual aesthetic — elaborate liturgy, rich music, sumptuous visuals — head to St. Thomas Church, the Episcopal showplace on Fifth Avenue at 53rd Street, which delivers all of this.

The architecture, by Ralph Adams Cram and Bertram Grosvenor Goodhue, is flamboyantly Gothic; the stained glass, now under conservation, superb. The church’s great altar screen, 80 feet tall and filigreed with figures, is Zeffirellian in size and impact, complementing the forceful singing of the St. Thomas Choir. Most convenient, the church stages its version of total music-theater on Sundays, the day the Metropolitan Opera is dark.

Like the Met, St. Thomas is a place you go for an event, not to hang out. I prefer the less demanding atmosphere of another Midtown church, St. Paul the Apostle, on Columbus Avenue at 60th Street. St. Paul’s interior is just as massive as St. Thomas’s, but less fastidiously groomed. It feels worn smooth, like much-handled wood, as befits a church that was built to see hard use as a spiritual center for Hell’s Kitchen.

The order of Roman Catholic priests that established the church, the Paulists, was founded by Isaac Thomas Hecker, a 19th-century New Yorker with a highly developed social consciousness and a utopian streak. He spent time in a New England transcendentalist community before becoming a priest, and created his religious order specifically to serve the poor.

St. Paul’s, like St. Thomas’s, has lots of art, but the mix is eclectic and funky. Stanford White’s graceful altar baldachin clashes with a chunky white marble angel by Lumen Martin Winter. And nothing quite goes with a mural by Augustus Vincent Tack, best known for his semi-abstract skyscapes but here represented by a painting of St. Thérèse of Lisieux.

So, a jumble, but very American, very New York.

Walking from one chapel to the next is like TV channel-surfing: there’s something totally different with each click, but everything feels of a piece, part of the same messy, fervid popular culture. I used to visit St. Paul’s to read and think when I worked in the area years ago. It had good vibes and good ghosts. In the ’80s, when AIDS was hammering the city, the Paulists were on the case, giving help.

At some point I learned that Billie Holiday’s funeral had taken place here, with Benny Goodman, Gene Krupa, Teddy Wilson and Mary Lou Williams in attendance. Even the St. Thomas Choir couldn’t match that lineup.

Morningside Heights

Among churches supporting progressive causes, few can match the track record of the Cathedral Church of St. John the Divine at Amsterdam Avenue and 112th Street. And few can match its immense size, or the elasticity of its construction schedule. Building started in 1892 and is still very much under way.

And for fans of eclectic art, a visit to St. John’s is like going to heaven. You find stained-glass windows dedicated to both saints and baseball players, carved statues of the Virgin Mary and Betsy Ross, Byzantine icons and patchwork quilts, a painting attributed to Simone Martini and a Keith Haring altarpiece.

The richness of the aesthetic stew is somewhat reduced at present. A recent interior renovation required the removal of many pieces of art, new and old, from chapels and bays, and it seems that the works are either returning very slowly or not coming back at all. The place is looking ultraspare, even with presence of an origami Christmas tree.

During a teaching stint I brought a class here. Ostensibly we were considering differences between Christian and Hindu religious architecture. But the discussion soon swung around to the question of mixing traditional religion with New Age-Pop, as St. John’s does, and was that a problem. After much looking and talking, a consensus was reached: not a problem. And as to the cathedral’s state of perpetual incompletion, that’s life.

Completion was not an issue for Riverside Church, another stupendous religious structure near Columbia University, thanks to infusions of Rockefeller cash. The result is a picture-perfect neo-Gothic interior with a festive, even Christmasy look year round, a stage for pageantry that is itself a tightly executed visual pageant.

Where this church has remained open ended is in its interdenominational and interracial thinking, which has produced a diverse membership with a strong African-American component. In 1997, when the black church historian James Melvin Washington died of a stroke at 49, his memorial was at Riverside. My partner, Joe Rosch, had been studying with Washington at Union Theological Seminary, and we attended the service. Large as it is, the place was packed, and among the guests of honor were dozens of high-ranking figures in the African-American clergy. Watching them file down the center aisle, I understood as never before not only the institutional power of the black church, but also the ability of architecture to amplify that power.

Upper Manhattan

Such amplification is taking place on Christmas in major churches all over Manhattan: from Trinity Church, to St. Patrick’s, to Riverside, to the spectacular houses of worship in Harlem, like the Abyssinian Baptist Church, with its amphitheater sanctuary and standing-room-only crowds, on West 138th Street (now called Odell M. Clark Place).

But by the late ’80s I had moved even farther uptown, to the northern tip of the island in Inwood, where the churches tend to be smaller, poorer and on uncertain demographic footing. One, Good Shepherd, on Broadway at Isham Street, was originally a Paulist outpost. A Celtic cross prominent on this Romanesque-style church’s exterior attested to a ministry directed at Irish immigrants, though by the ’80s the Irish had given way to arrivals from the Dominican Republic.

Another neighborhood landmark, the tiny Holy Trinity Church at Cumming Street and Seaman Avenue, once existed in Harlem until a wave of white flight in the 1920s carried it to still-rural Inwood. Its Episcopal parishioners commissioned a rather grand building. But construction stopped abruptly with the stock market crash in 1929, and the sanctuary ended up being an ungrand, no-frills affair. Over the decades the congregation shrank. When I moved in across the street, the church had just eight members, and the buildings were in disrepair.

Farther north still, St. Stephen’s United Methodist Church is physically off the island of Manhattan and in the Bronx at West 228th Street, though its exact neighborhood, Marble Hill, is under Manhattan jurisdiction. Dating from 1897, the church has the delightful shingle-style look of a country chapel, but has clearly seen rough urban times.

But life in these three churches goes on. When 9/11 struck, Irish-Americans who had moved away from Inwood flooded back to Good Shepherd, where numerous funerals for firefighters and police officers were held. That renewal of primal ties was wrenching to see.

Today masses are in Spanish and English, and the Paulists have been replaced by community-friendly Franciscans. Last week the sanctuary was still somber for Advent, but a crèche outside looked pretty, and the church doors were open all day.

At Holy Trinity, where fragile 1927 architectural renderings of the never-built church hang in a vestibule, a leaky roof has at last been replaced, with interior renovation, including repairing water damage, to come next. The present vicar, the Rev. Johanna-Karen Johannson, has attracted a congregation of 50 members.

At St. Stephen’s, where the sanctuary is a mini-version of the Abyssinian Baptist amphitheater, the pastor, the Rev. Nathaniel Dixon, is also a jazz saxophonist who holds concerts in the church every week. There was lots of music in progress when I dropped by on a recent evening: a drumming class upstairs, a hymn singalong with guitar in a first-floor room, along with a small meeting of parishioners making Christmas plans.

One of them, Veronica, greeted me and asked if I had any questions. I did, and I asked them, then told her I’d been looking at churches all over Manhattan, and had come to this one because I lived nearby. “You have a place of worship?” she asked. I said no. “Why don’t you try this one?” she asked. I said I wasn’t really the churchgoing kind.

She looked at me a long minute. “But here you are.”