West Side Church on Road to Landmark Status
By Sewell Chan, New York Times:
The West Park Presbyterian Church on the Upper West Side, a Romanesque Revival edifice of red sandstone familiar to anyone who has ventured into the neighboring Barney Greengrass for bagel and lox, took a major step Tuesday toward becoming a New York City landmark.
The Landmarks Preservation Commission voted to schedule a public hearing for the church and for three other sites: the Fort Washington Presbyterian Church in Washington Heights; the Ridgewood Theater in Queens; and the former headquarters of the Brooklyn Union Gas Company in Brooklyn Heights. The body also agreed to hold a hearing on a proposal to create an Audubon Park Historic District in Washington Heights.
Because the commission is usually reluctant to schedule such hearings unless there is broad support for a landmark designation, most structures for which is a hearing is scheduled end up being designated landmarks.
The church complex, at 165 West 86th Street and Amsterdam Avenue, began as a chapel designed by Leopold Eidlitz in 1883. The congregation, which quickly outgrew the chapel, hired Henry F. Kilburn to design the main sanctuary, which includes a soaring tower that anchors the northeast corner of the intersection.
The commission’s chairman, Robert B. Tierney, said the decision to hold a hearing was a “natural outgrowth” of two years of discussions “with church representatives, elected officials, concerned residents and preservation advocacy groups about extending landmark protection to this remarkable building.”
The other Presbyterian church under consideration for landmark status, the Fort Washington Presbyterian Church, at 21 Wadsworth Avenue in Washington Heights, is a neo-Georgian church, designed by Thomas Hastings of the firm of Carrère & Hastings, the architects of the New York Public Library. The church was built in 1914 as an affiliate of West Park Presbyterian.
The church is just to the north of the proposed Audubon Park Historic District, which would include 19 large apartment houses built from 1905 to 1932 between West 155th and West 158th Streets, from Broadway and Edward M. Morgan Place to Riverside Drive. The buildings, in variations of the Beaux-Arts and Renaissance Revival styles, were built as a mostly rural area was quickly transformed into a dense urban habitat.
The Ridgewood Theater in Queens, completed in 1914, was designed by Thomas Lamb, known for his work on theaters, in the Classical Revival style for the Fox movie chain. It seated 2,500 people, and at its closing in March 2008 it was considered the longest continuously operating movie theater in the country.
The former headquarters of the Brooklyn Union Gas Company at 180 Union Street, a late work of the architect Frank Freeman, was built in 1916 in the neoclassical style. It is owned by St. Francis College, a Franciscan private school.