The Riverside Church

Rockefeller’s Gothic skyscraper with giant bells, where Martin Luther King Jr. spoke out against the Vietnam War

Local name: The Riverside Church

Collection: Harlem and Upper Manhattan · USA · Open in OpenStreetMap

The Riverside Church tower above the park trees · Jay Dobkin, CC BY-SA 4.0, Wikimedia Commons

The story

Before you is the Riverside Church. Its tower, about 392 feet tall, can be seen from far away, even from the Hudson River. The church was built between 1928 and 1930. The money came from John D. Rockefeller Jr., more than ten and a half million dollars. The first pastor was the preacher Harry Emerson Fosdick. He wanted a church open to everyone, of every denomination, race and nation. The architects took the Gothic cathedrals of France as their model, above all Chartres. But under the limestone walls is a steel frame, like a skyscraper’s. It made construction faster, and it carries the weight of the bells. In December 1928 the scaffolding caught fire, and the unfinished tower went up like a torch. An estimated one hundred thousand people watched. The first Sunday service was held on the fifth of October 1930, and three thousand two hundred people came. The tower holds a carillon of more than seventy bells. Rockefeller gave them in memory of his mother, Laura Spelman Rockefeller. The largest bell weighs twenty tons. According to the city’s Landmarks Preservation Commission, it is the largest tuned carillon bell ever cast. On the fourth of April 1967, Martin Luther King Jr. gave a speech here against the Vietnam War, exactly one year before he was killed. And in June 1990, soon after his release from prison, Nelson Mandela came here for a service held in his honor.

Visiting

490 Riverside Drive, at 120th Street. Subway: the 1 train to 116th Street–Columbia University, then about a ten-minute walk. This is a working church: check the church’s website, trcnyc.org, for when you can go inside and hear the bells.