Look to your left to spot the striking New Jersey red sandstone facade of the Fifth Avenue Presbyterian Church, easily recognizable by its pointed Gothic arches and a towering spire featuring a prominent clock face. Take a glance at your screen to see a great wide shot of this magnificent exterior.
Back in eighteen seventy-three, the congregation bought this undeveloped plot and dropped a cool one million dollars on construction-about twenty-eight million dollars today-aiming to build a cathedral in what was then a quiet, wealthy residential area called Millionaires Row. They spent so much because they genuinely believed the newly built Central Park would act as a permanent fortress, blocking the loud, industrial chaos of lower Manhattan from ever reaching their doorstep.
They hired a relatively unknown thirty-seven-year-old German architect named Carl Pfeiffer. Pfeiffer pulled off an incredible architectural magic trick by designing a building within a building. The walls of the sanctuary inside actually do not touch the exterior stone walls you see from the street. A layer of air separates them, acting as a thermal and acoustic shield against the city noise. If you pull up the second photo on your app, you can see the gorgeous interior with its sloping floor and curved pews, designed so that a whisper from the pulpit reaches the very back row.
That soaring clock tower holds a mechanical rarity. It is one of only two manually wound tower clocks left in New York City, meaning every single week, a staff member hikes up there to wind the heavy weights by hand. Talk about getting your steps in. Noticeably absent from that tower are bells. When the church opened in eighteen seventy-five, Saint Luke's Hospital sat directly across the street, and church leaders deliberately left out the chimes so they would not disturb the resting patients.
This congregation has never shied away from shaking things up, though. In nineteen fifty-six, Pastor John Bonnell noticed how isolated city dwellers felt and launched Dial-a-Prayer, a dedicated phone line playing a recorded prayer. It became an overnight sensation, requiring a whole bank of phone lines just to handle the traffic.
Decades later, in two thousand and one, the church made headlines by suing the City of New York. The police had started forcibly removing homeless individuals who slept on the church steps. The church argued that sheltering the vulnerable was a core religious practice protected by the First Amendment, the part of the United States Constitution guaranteeing the free exercise of religion. A federal judge agreed, ruling that the elevated steps were a private religious space, allowing the church to continue its physical sanctuary while the city kept the public sidewalks clear.
This grand house of worship welcomes visitors most days from nine A-M to six P-M, with shortened hours on weekends. Take a moment to admire the stonework before we move along. Whenever you are ready, we will head toward our next stop.
