Walking around New York (B&W Series) by Sergio Brisola Open the post to see the bigger picture...
Saint Thomas Episcopal Church entrance in Fifth Avenue - NYC
Saint Thomas Church, located at the corner of 53rd Street and Fifth Avenue in the borough of Manhattan in New York, New York in the United States, is an Episcopal parish church of the Episcopal Diocese of New York. It is also known as Saint Thomas Church Fifth Avenue or as Saint Thomas Church in the City of New York and was incorporated on 9 January 1824. The current structure, completed in 1914, is the fourth church built to house this congregation and was designed by the architects Ralph Adams Cram and Bertram Grosvenor Goodhue in the French High Gothic Revival style.
The church is home to the Saint Thomas Choir of Men and Boys a choral ensemble comprising men and boys which performs music of the Anglican tradition at worship services and offers a full concert series during the course of the year. The boys of the Saint Thomas Choir (as the men are professional singers) are enrolled at the Saint Thomas Choir School, the only church-affiliated residential choir school in the United States.
The present church, a designated New York landmark, was built from 1911 to 1913, designed by a partnership of Ralph Adams Cram, who also designed the Princeton University chapel, and Bertram Grosvenor Goodhue, who designed nearby St. Bartholomew's church. Lee Lawrie designed the many sculptures and decorations, most notably the 60 figures of the magnificent reredos, which is 80 feet (24 m) high. Prior to working together on Saint Thomas Church, Lawrie and Goodhue worked together on El Fureidis, an estate located in Montecito, California. First designs date from 1906, the church opened for services in 1913. Its magnificence is the happy result of a dramatic, impulsive act of compassion: The 1906 San Francisco earthquake had so shocked the rector, Rev. Ernest Stires, that he rushed the accumulated balance in his parish's building fund to aid the stricken city. Throughout New York and beyond, an impressed public responded in kind to his generosity with unsolicited gifts that more than replenished the fund.
This masterpiece of a city church, with bold massing and a strong profile, has plain ashlar limestone exterior surfaces and sandstone interior surfaces in French High Gothic style, embellished with dense French Flamboyant Gothic detail in the window tracery, in the small arches of the triforium, and in the rich stonework of the reredos, where Bertram Goodhue's original genius in decoration, and sculpture designed, by Lee Lawrie, are inspired by the altar screen at Winchester Cathedral in England.
Saint Thomas church is characterized by a high main arcade and an open triforium, and clerestory. Making the most of a restricted rectangular urban corner site with no space for transepts, St. Thomas has the scale of a large parish church (which it is), and, except for its foreshortened length, the proportions of major European and English cathedrals, with nave vaults 95 feet (29 m) high.
The church, like New York's Cathedral of Saint John the Divine, the largest Gothic church in the world, whose nave and west facade were designed by Cram, is built of stone on stone, without any steel reinforcing. The ribs of the vault are load-bearing structure. Cram's approach to a structurally authentic and a scholarly, but not imitative Gothic style, emphasized originality through logical development of the historical Gothic styles, tempered by creative scholarship and employing the use of modern machinery in the execution of stonecutting and dressing. In a letter of 1925 Cram said that he considered a rigorous modern Gothic to be "a logical continuation of the great Christian culture of the past, but also a vital contribution to modern life."
Cram excelled at planning buildings and at the general massing of forms, while Goodhue had an inventive eye for appropriate decorative detail. Often each worked on separate buildings, depending on the advice and approval of the other. Sometimes they worked together on major projects, as at Saint Thomas, their final collaboration.
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