After thousands of Sunday morning services, generations of weddings and funerals, nearly a century of Christmases – and then Dias de Navidad, as the neighborhood evolved – the church at 21 Wadsworth Avenue is showing its age. The white columns that greet Washington Heights Presbyterians are shedding their paint. Inside, sky blue paint peels from the corners of the domed sanctuary ceiling. But the most alarming disrepair looms farther above, in the cracked stones and rusted beams of the church’s tower.
The congregation and preservationists hope recognition will lead to restoration for the Fort Washington Presbyterian Church, which was added to the state Register of Historic Places on Sept. 15. In May the city gave landmark status to the church, built in 1913. Known as La Iglesia Presbiteriana Fort Washington Heights since a Hispanic congregation took over in 1982, the building is expected to be listed on the National Register of Historic Places in the next few months.
“This church is so architecturally significant,” said Kathleen Howe, the state historic preservation specialist who prepared the state register proposal. The city landmark proposal required only a description of the building’s exterior, so Howe added documentation of the interior for the state application.
The church’s neo-Georgian portico and tiered tower are the work of the early 20th-century architect Thomas Hastings, who designed the church for West Presbyterian Church and Park Presbyterian Church when the two congregations merged in 1911. Hastings’ firm is known for the New York Public Library and other landmark civic buildings on the East Coast, but he had strong family ties to the church. His father was the retired pastor of West Presbyterian; his grandfather wrote the hymn “Rock of Ages.”
Even as the faces and the languages of the neighborhood have changed over the years, the building has always been home to a Presbyterian congregation. The basement that housed a soup kitchen during the Great Depression is now scattered with art supplies for an after-school program.
The Rev. Carmen Rosario called the new historic designations a matter of pride for the congregation, which includes many immigrants from the Dominican Republic and other Latin American countries. The building, like their faith, anchors their sense of place in the long story of New York because this particular corner has always been a place for immigrants, Rosario said. A commemorative history published for the building’s 25th anniversary in 1938 trumpeted that the church had “embraced men, women and children from every country on the globe.”
The building drew immigrants from a variety of European countries in its earlier days, and Rosario said it’s an honor to get architectural recognition for the building during Latin American immigrants’ turn. “That is important not only to the church, but to the Latino community around us,” she said.
The historic designations are also a matter of practicality: Landmarked buildings are eligible for grants the church desperately needs to keep the building intact. About 50 people attend the service each week, and many are senior citizens – they don’t have the money or energy to make up for years of neglected maintenance, Rosario said. “We don’t have the resources at all,” she said.
The ornate tower still dwarfs billboards and apartments crowding the neighborhood skyline, but summers of rain and frozen winters have left it dangerously unstable. An evaluation of the tower in 2008 by the New York firm Old Structures Engineering concluded that the steel deterioration and masonry damage “will get worse with time at an increasing rate.” The report presented three options: fully repair the entire structure; remove damaged stones as a temporary repair; or demolish the top of the tower.
Ann-Isabel Friedman, director of the New York Landmarks Conservancy’s Sacred Sites program, has been working with the church since 2002 and hopes to develop a conservation plan in the next year, now that the building is eligible for grants. But even erecting scaffolding for a tower that high would cost almost $100,000. That’s the maximum amount Sacred Sites can provide – and the recession’s effect on fundraising means the actual amount available is much lower. “I only have as much money to give away as I can raise in a given year,” Friedman said.
The church is also eligible for state money set aside for preservation of nonprofit, register-listed sites – but competition for those grants is stiff. The state Historic Preservation Fund provides grants up to $600,000 and often selects religious properties, said Merrill Hesch, the regional grants officer for the New York City region. But only a few projects are chosen each year from more than a dozen applications, and the grant can only cover three-quarters of the total price tag even with eased requirements for areas where the poverty rate exceeds 10 percent . Buildings owned by religious organizations or used for religious purposes often cannot receive government money, including the city’s grants, because of constitutional mandates for separation of church and state.
Friedman doesn’t want to resort to the “triage approach” of partial repair. Supporting the tower in unsightly plywood and cables would buy only 10 years to figure out a better plan, she said, and would hide the architectural selling points from potential donors. The other option short of full repair – decapitating the top tiers of the tower – would permanently diminish the building’s character.
But Friedman also knows the building cannot afford any more years of deferred maintenance. “I’m afraid what’s going to happen here,” she said, “is a wake-up call – which is something falls off the building.”
