St. Ann & the Holy Trinity Church

A Gothic church with the Bolton brothers’ windows, among the first pictorial stained glass made in America

Local name: St. Ann & the Holy Trinity Church

Collection: Brooklyn: the Heights and DUMBO · USA · Open in OpenStreetMap

The brownstone church at Montague and Clinton Streets · Beyond My Ken, CC BY-SA 4.0, Wikimedia Commons

The story

Before you is the Church of St. Ann and the Holy Trinity. It was built with his own money by Edgar Bartow, a wealthy Brooklyn paper manufacturer. He wanted a magnificent church where nobody had to pay for a pew. It went up between 1844 and 1847. The architect was Minard Lafever. His biographer called this church the most splendid achievement of his career. It opened on the twenty-fifth of April 1847, before the tower was finished. The spire was not completed until more than twenty years later. Ship captains, it is said, used it to find their way in the harbor. In 1906 the spire was taken down: the stone was crumbling, and repairs cost too much. The church’s great treasure is its stained glass. The windows were made by the brothers William Jay Bolton and John Bolton in their workshop in Pelham, just outside New York. The colored glass had to come from England, because it was not yet made in America. In five years the brothers created more than fifty windows. The parish considers them the first set of pictorial stained glass windows made in North America, forty years before the famous Tiffany. Up high are scenes from the Old Testament, at gallery level the life of Christ. The lowest windows hold a Tree of Jesse, the ancestry of Christ. It is usually drawn growing upward, but here it runs along the wall. In 1957 the Church of the Holy Trinity was closed, and the building stood empty for more than ten years. In 1969 the parish of St. Ann, the oldest Episcopal congregation in Brooklyn, moved in. That is how the church got its double name.

Visiting

157 Montague Street, at Clinton Street, Brooklyn Heights; the Court Street and Borough Hall subway stations are close by. This is a working Episcopal church. You can go inside for services; the schedule is on stannholytrinity.org.