Grace Church

Early Gothic Revival in New York: a young architect’s marble church where the city’s most fashionable couples wed

Local name: Grace Church

Collection: Greenwich Village and the East Village · USA · Open in OpenStreetMap

The church at the bend of Broadway · qwesy qwesy, CC BY 3.0, Wikimedia Commons

The story

Before you is Grace Church. The parish dates from 1808. Its first service was held on the twenty-first of December in a modest building at the corner of Broadway and Rector Street, in Lower Manhattan. The city was growing north, and in 1843 the parish bought a new site, Henry Brevoort’s apple orchard. The design went to his nephew, the engineer James Renwick Jr. He had never built anything like it. The rector, Thomas House Taylor, had toured Europe and wanted nothing but Gothic, yet there were almost no examples in America. Renwick drew from books. The church was consecrated on the seventh of March 1846, when its architect was not yet thirty. He would later build St. Patrick’s Cathedral on Fifth Avenue. The walls are white marble, cut by inmates of Sing Sing prison. The first spire was wooden; later it was replaced with a marble one. Look along Broadway: the street bends here, and the church tower closes the view. Grace Church at once became one of the most fashionable churches in town. The former mayor Philip Hone wrote in his diary that the aisles were full of ladies in feathers and dandies with mustaches. On the tenth of February 1863, two of P. T. Barnum’s performers were married here, the tiny General Tom Thumb and Lavinia Warren. It was one of the most anticipated weddings of its day, and three days later President Lincoln and his wife received the couple at the White House. Inside are forty-six English stained-glass windows. The great window above the altar was the gift of a parishioner, Catharine Lorillard Wolfe.

Visiting

802 Broadway, at the corner of East Tenth Street. It is an active Episcopal church. Opening hours and the service schedule are on gracechurchnyc.org. During services, do not walk around the church or use a flash. Subway: the R or W to 8th Street–NYU, or the 6 train to Astor Place.