Eleventh Street Methodist Episcopal Chapel

Landmarks Preservation Commission September 14, 2010, Designation List 433 LP- 2398 ELEVENTH STREET METHODIST EPISCOPAL CHAPEL (later People’s Home Church and Settlement, now The Father’s Heart Church), 545-547 East 11th Street, Manhattan Built, 1867-68; architect, William Field and Son; altered, 1900-1901, Jallade and Barber Landmark Site: Borough of Borough Tax Map Block 405, Lot 39 On March 23, 2010, the Landmarks Preservation Commission held a public hearing on the proposed designation as a Landmark of the Eleventh Street Methodist Episcopal Chapel (later People’s Home Church and Settlement, now The Father’s Heart Church) and the proposed designation of the related Landmark Site (Item No. 1). The hearing was duly advertised in accordance with the provisions of law. There were 5 speakers in favor of designation, including the owner of the building, the owner’s architect, City Council Member Rosie Mendez, representatives of Lower East Side Preservation Initiative, Historic Districts Council and the Greenwich Village Society for Historic Preservation. There were no speakers in opposition to designation. The Commission received one letter from the Metropolitan Chapter of the Victorian Society in support of the designation. Summary The Eleventh Street Methodist Episcopal Chapel (later People’s Home Church and Settlement, now The Father’s Heart Church) was constructed in 1867-68 to the design of prominent architects William Field and Son. The firm is best known as the architects of affordable apartment houses and this is one of the few known houses of worship that they designed. By the mid-19th century the Gothic Revival style had become the standard for church buildings in the United States. Gothic Revival style features of the church include the window hood moldings with stops and the pointed finials at the roof; however, the squares with stylized flower designs and the pointed arched corbel table of the cornice are decorative, eclectic features that are highly unusual. Architects Jallade and Barber altered the front facade of the church in 1900-01 by moving the entrance from the center bay to the western bay; the new entrance was designed with a then-fashionable Colonial Revival style door surround featuring brick quoins and a stone lintel with splayed keystones and stops. After the alterations, the mission reopened in 1901 with a new name, the People’s Home Church and Settlement, and its institutional work was enlarged. The Lower East Side was one of the most densely populated neighborhoods in the city and had a predominately lower-income immigrant population. Mission churches such as the Eleventh Street Methodist Episcopal Chapel provided social services in addition to religious evangelical work. In addition to religious services, prayer meetings and a Sunday school, the settlement had a dispensary, kindergarten, day nursery, fresh air program, gymnasium, baths, industrial classes, music instruction, reading room, penny provident society, and numerous clubs. The church also had an extensive mission to Italian immigrants and there were services, meetings and bible classes conducted in Italian. The Methodist Episcopal Church closed the church in 1930 and sold the building to the Russian Ukrainian Polish Pentecostal Church, the first Slavic Pentecostal church in the country, in 1941. Its successor, The Father’s Heart Church, still occupies the premises. The work of the church today, like its 19th century predecessors on the Lower East Side, includes religious and social services. DESCRIPTION AND ANALYSIS History of the Tompkins Square Neighborhood1 The Eleventh Street Methodist Episcopal Chapel is located in a section of the Lower East Side of Manhattan, now known as the East Village, which includes Avenue A east to Avenue D and from 11th Street to Houston Street. The term is used as an umbrella for a number of different neighborhoods with complex, overlapping and interconnected histories. The chapel is located between Avenue A and Avenue B, one block north of Tompkins Square Park, in what has come to be known as the Tompkins Square neighborhood. In the late 18th century, the area east of Second Avenue was the estate of Mangle Minthorn, slave owner and father-in-law of Daniel D. Tompkins (1775-1825), governor of New York and vice president of the United States under President James Monroe. The Commissioner’s Plan of 1811, which plotted the layout of streets throughout Manhattan, created Clinton Square, located between Avenues A and B and 7th and 10th Streets, proposed as the site of a farmers’ market. Clinton Square was renamed Tompkins Square in 1833, and the following year the city began to have it fenced, graded, and landscaped as a park, in part as an effort to encourage development. During the first half of the 19th century, brick and brownstone residences were developed along the east side of the park and the Tompkins Square area was populated by workers and middle-class shop owners.2 The fashionable heyday of the neighborhood surrounding Tompkins Square was short lived. Beginning with the first construction of tenement buildings in the 1840s, the bulk of the population was made up of Irish Catholics working in the shipbuilding and construction trades. Later in the 19th century, the population became mostly German, a group that dominated the area into the 20th century. The northern section of the Lower East Side, east of the Bowery and north of Division Street, became known as Kleindeutschland, Little Germany, Dutchtown, or Deutschlandle. From the late 1840s to 1860, “another hundred thousand Germans fleeing land shortages, unemployment, famine, and political and religious oppression” joined their countrymen who had already made it to America.3 The community overflowed the area near City Hall, where they previously lived, and established a new neighborhood whose boundaries expanded north to 18th Street and east to the East River. By 1880, the German-speaking population of Kleindeutschland exceeded 250,000 making up approximately one-quarter of the city’s population and becoming one of the most densely populated neighborhoods in the world. In 1904 more than 1,000 of the area’s residents died in the burning of the General Slocum, an excursion steamboat. (A monument to the victims stands in Tompkins Square.) Following the tragic accident, many of the remaining German residents moved out of the area. Italian, Eastern European, Russian, and Jewish immigrants replaced the German residents and made the neighborhood their own. Although there has been some recent new construction, many of the 19th and early 20th century masonry row houses and tenements, built for the masses of immigrants then arriving in New York, still line the neighborhood’s streets. The remaining late-19th and early-20th century churches and synagogues suggest the historic diversity of the area. 2 History of the Site4 The land on which the Eleventh Street Methodist Episcopal Chapel was built was part of the bowery of Peter Stuyvesant (1602-1687), Director General of the West India Company in New Netherlands. He purchased Bowery #1, on which he situated his home, and part of Bowery #2, which became the nucleus of his holdings, from the West India Company on March 12, 1651. (Bowery is an Anglicization of the old Dutch word for farm). The land that separated the two farms eventually became Stuyvesant Street. 11th Street, between Avenues A and B, was part of Bowery #2. Stuyvesant cultivated large sections of his land, employing the approximately 40 slaves he owned. His property was ultimately bequeathed (including this block), but for a few exceptions, to his great- grandson, Petrus Stuyvesant (1727-1805) who, in the Dutch style of the time, used the Latin form of his name. The block was part of land that Petrus’s son, Nicholas William Stuyvesant (1769-1833) inherited. Nicholas William Stuyvesant and his wife Catherine Livingston Reade Stuyvesant conveyed the entire block to Charles Henry Hall and Robert L. Reade in 1825.5 The property went through numerous owners before being conveyed by Michael and Ann Lowe to Cyrus W. Loder in 1866.6 Cyrus W. Loder and his wife Sarah A. Loder then conveyed the land to the Methodist Episcopal Church in the following year.7 History of the Methodism in New York City and the Eleventh Street Methodist Episcopal Chapel The Methodist Episcopal Church began as a renewal movement within the Anglican Church (Church of England) led by Anglican ministers John Wesley (1703-91) and his brother Charles Wesley (1707-88). The first Methodist congregation in New York City was established in 1766 by Barbara Ruckle Heck (1734-1804) and her cousin Philip Embury (1728-73), Irish immigrant lay persons. Francis Ashbury (1745-1816), considered to be the founder of American Methodism, arrived in this country in 1771 and preached at the Wesley Chapel (constructed in 1768, later known as the John Street Methodist Episcopal Church)8 that same year. The Methodist Episcopal Church in America was organized in 1784 in Baltimore. By the end of the 18th century there were five houses of Methodist public worship in New York City: the “old church” (Wesley Chapel); the Bowery; North River Church; Two Mile Stone (two miles from the center of the city, Nassau and Wall Streets, near the present Cooper Union); and the African Church (erected by African-Americans for their own worship at Cross Street between Mulberry and Orange Streets).9 The expansion of the Methodist movement in this country during the 19th century was the result of its extensive missionary work. In 1844 the Ladies Home Missionary Society was formed and through its efforts several urban missions were established including the Five Points Mission, located on the site of the Old Brewery at 63 Park Street. A brick building was erected at the corner of East 9th Street and Avenue B in 1846-47, which became known as the Dry Dock Mission.

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