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Serbian Orthodox Cathedral of St. Sava

Location
15 West 25th Street
Neighborhoods
Serbian Orthodox Cathedral of St. Sava 1 Churches Flatiron Tenderloin

Arriving at the Serbian Orthodox Cathedral of St. Sava, I was greeted by the Very Reverend Djokan Majstorovic, a native Serbian who has served as cathedral dean for the past seventeen years. The Reverend welcomed me into his office and explained that, like many of Manhattan’s churches, the Cathedral of St. Sava has a long, rich history. Originally known as Trinity Chapel, an offshoot of Trinity Church on Wall Street, it was built in 1855 as a place of worship for “uptown” Episcopalians. A number of prominent New Yorkers attended Trinity Chapel in the late 19th century, and I was excited to learn that Edith Wharton got married there in 1885. And not only that—Trinity Chapel makes an appearance in The Age of Innocence, one of her most famous novels.

By the early 20th century, 25th Street had become a bustling commercial area, and many of the church’s parishioners moved away. In 1943, the Serbian community purchased Trinity Chapel and renamed it for St. Sava, the first Serbian archbishop. Reverend Djokan told me that over the past seventy years, the cathedral has grown into an educational and cultural center that hosts lectures, concerts, and youth activities. Worshipers come from Long Island, Westchester, Brooklyn, and Queens to participate in religious services, and on holidays, as many as 1,000 people gather at St. Sava.

The cathedral has been designated a national landmark building, and when I walked inside, I could see why. Most of the original stained glass windows are still intact, as are the church’s distinctive patterned tiles. Stunning murals from the 1920s decorate the walls alongside the pews, and the gorgeous rose window has been restored with deep, vivid colors. Some traces of the cathedral’s Episcopalian past are still visible - the intricate wooden pulpit, for example. The beautiful hand-carved iconostasis, painted by a famous Russian iconographer and transported all the way from Yugoslavia, separates the sanctuary from the rest of the church. The windows facing 26th Street, which were destroyed by an explosion in the 1970s, have been replaced with Byzantine-style stained glass.

But the beautiful history of this building comes with a price. The Reverend told us that it is extremely expensive to maintain, and the church recently spent fifteen years and four million dollars to restore the crumbling slate roof. “Between the community and some grants,” the Reverend told us, “we managed to raise all the money, and today we don’t have any debt.” But now the church hall, which was built in 1868 and houses feasts and community events, is also in need of restoration.

There is a statue of Nikola Tesla outside the church, and I was surprised to learn that he was buried by a priest from St. Sava. Though he never got to see the cathedral itself—it was purchased just months after his death—he was an active member in the New York Serbian Orthodox community. Michael Pupin, a Pulitzer-prize winning physicist, and St. Bishop Nikolai Velimirovich, an important writer and orator, were also influential early members of St. Sava.

On May 1, 2016, the church sadly caught fire and burned to the ground. Happily, no parishioners were inside, but the whole city grieves to have lost such a beautiful and historic structure.

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Marble Collegiate Church

Completed in 1854, and housing a congregation that dates back to the 1600s, Marble Collegiate Church is one of the most prominent and stunning churches in New York. Its exterior stands out among the glimmering towers of Fifth Avenue – a breathtaking reminder of a smaller-scale New York of the nineteenth century. Several of us had the privilege of receiving a tour of Marble's magnificent space. Ashley Johnson, Marketing and Communications Manager, and our tour guide for the day, impressed us with her vast knowledge of the historic landmark. Pausing first at the exterior, Ashley explained the imposing iron fence surrounding the building – “It was originally to keep out cows, ” she laughed. “Our nearest neighbor was a dairy farmer. Back in the 1800s, this was considered the sticks! You would’ve taken a carriage up Fifth Avenue (then a dirt path) to get here. ” The blue and yellow ribbons hanging on the fence, she went on to say, are tributes to the soldiers and civilians injured or killed in conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan. Moving to the interior, we were struck by the lavishness of the sanctuary. One Manhattan Sideways team member exclaimed: “I’ve never seen a church with wallpaper before! ” Ashley clarified, “It’s actually not wallpaper – it’s stencil. ” The walls are painted a lush red, decorated with gold stencils of the fleur-de-lis. Complementing the deep color of the walls is the matching red upholstery covering the pews. After we had stared in awe for a considerable period of time, Ashley said: “The way you see this space now is how you would have seen it in 1891. This is High Victorian – not how it was originally conceived. ” The church’s sanctuary, then, is a living record of the aesthetic changes to Marble Church. “When it was originally built, it was very stark – true to its Calvinistic roots. ” There was clear glass in the windows at that time, she told us, and the interior was white and dominated by a central pulpit on the chancel. These features were later upgraded when Dr. David James Burrell became the senior minister of the church in the late 1800s. He removed the pulpit, “wanting to be closer to his congregation, ” and oversaw extensive renovations of the sanctuary, including replacing the clear glass windows with stained glass, which can still be seen in the front hall narthex of the church. In 1900 and 1901, the church began what was to become a century-long project of replacing all the plain stained glass windows with the multi-colored pictorial scenes you can view today. The first two pictorial stained glass windows, installed at the turn of the nineteenth century, were fabricated by the world-renowned Tiffany Studios, headed by Louis Comfort Tiffany. Depicting Biblical stories, the church’s oldest windows are breathtakingly detailed, featuring hand-painted, colorful glass of diverse textures and thicknesses. It is certainly easy to get lost in their storytelling. After the windows were installed, there was a long hiatus before the next window was commissioned. Ashley suggested a number of reasons for the wait: the Great Depression, WWII, and stained glass falling out of vogue. “The church had all of these Victorian style stained glass windows without pictures, and then there were these two Tiffany windows sitting right in the middle; it was a beautiful oddity. ” In 1998, thanks to the generosity of church patrons Robert and Maria Ryneveld, Marble Collegiate Church set out to complete the vision that had begun 98 years earlier. 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New York Vintage 1 Vintage undefined

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