Phone +1 212-362-9300 | ||
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Address 251 W 80th St, New York, NY 10024, USA Similar St Michael's Episcopal, Jan Hus Presbyterian Church, Church of the Blessed, Congregation Shaare Zedek, Church of St Paul and St A Profiles | ||
All Angels' Church is an Episcopal parish church on Manhattan's Upper West Side neighborhood of New York City.
Contents
History and previous location
All Angels' was founded in the 1830s as a mission to New York's poor extended by St. Michael’s Episcopal Church on 99th Street and Amsterdam Avenue. The missionary parish served Seneca Village, demolished in the creation of Central Park. The sanctuary was formerly located on the southeast corner of West End Avenue and West Eighty-first and was built 1890 to neo-Gothic designs by Samuel B. Snook of J.B. Snook & Sons. It was later altered in 1896 by Karl Bitter Studio. The AIA Guide to NYC described it: “Turning the axis of this church diagonally to the street grid was a brilliant if subtle design decision which gave character to the intersection (at least until a less-subtle design decision gave it a superhuman television set [the Calhoun School] as competitor across the way). There is an intimate garden adjacent, created by the church’s geometry, reached from West 81st Street.”
The interior was described as spectacular in the New York Times. "Among its treasures was a two-and-a- half-story Tiffany window and a pulpit ringed with limestone angels that wrapped around the banister and paraded toward the top. There, a carved wooden angel leaned out and blew his trumpet into the center of the sanctuary. The pulpit is conserved in the American Wing of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
"'There was a wonderful effect in the afternoon, when the setting sun, the afternoon sun, would hit the Tiffany window, which was on the northwest corner, and so it bathed the whole back end of the church in this very golden light, because there’s a lot of gold and gray-blue in that window. Of course you had oak pews, and you had the red carpeting, so all of that was made more golden out of the light.'"The sanctuary was hastily demolished in 1979 and replaced by a large apartment building, to the shock of the community. The present parish building (illustrated) is the former parish house.
Renewal
All Angels' Church experienced a renewal in the 1980s. The congregation has outreach activities to the local poor. The present rector is Rev. Milind Sojwal.