Highbridge Community Church
1272 Ogden Avenue | also 1270 Ogden Avenue | Highbridge | built 1888
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The city photographed every building for its tax records around 1940 and again in the 1980s. NYC Municipal Archives.
Written with AI from the source each entry cites, then fact-checked.
- 1866
Highbridgeville's Protestants finish a chapel on Highbridge Avenue
With no church within several miles, local Protestants organized a congregation in October 1860 under William Newton Clark and incorporated it in 1864. Their Union Sunday-School met in various neighborhood buildings until donations paid for land and a chapel, completed in 1866, which became the community's religious center. That chapel stood on the church's land until the 1880s, when the congregation bought more property, moved it to the east and built the present church.
“…funds were donated to purchase property and to construct a chapel on Highbridge Avenue. After its completion in 1866…”
- 1888
A fast-growing flock under Rev. Daniel Hoffman Martin dedicates a new stone church
The congregation joined the Reformed Church of America in 1874. After Daniel Hoffman Martin became its own minister in 1884, membership grew quickly, so the church bought more land, moved the old chapel east and built a new church between December 1887 and its dedication in December 1888, under an $18,000 contract. The New York Times described it as a picturesque new home.
“After 1884, with the installation of its own minister, Daniel Hoffman Martin, the membership of the church grew rapidly…”
- 1888
Alfred E. Barlow designs a Richardsonian Romanesque church of rough gneiss and red sandstone
Barlow, a little-known architect who had started out designing suburban residences, gave the church rockfaced gneiss walls with red sandstone trim, a steep gable on Ogden Avenue with three round-arched windows, buttressed sides and a square bell tower rising above the southwest corner. The firm of D.C. Weeks & Son built it. The Landmarks Preservation Commission ranks it among the city's finest Richardsonian Romanesque churches and an unusually informal, suburban version of the style.
- 1889
The Tiffany Glass Co. fills the altar end with a rose window of seven circles
In 1889 a leaded rose window of stained glass from Louis Comfort Tiffany's Tiffany Glass Co. was installed at the altar end, its geometric pattern built from seven circular motifs. Robert Koch, in his 1982 study of Tiffany, singled out this church's windows as an example of the firm's best pre-1890 work, and noted that more than half of the New York churches on an 1893 list of Tiffany commissions had since been demolished.
- 1946
Rev. Daniel G. Verway ends thirty years as the church's pastor
Daniel G. Verway served as pastor of the Union Reformed Church of Highbridge for three decades. His tenure ended in 1946.
- 2010
The old Union Reformed Church becomes a city landmark as Highbridge Community Church
The Landmarks Preservation Commission designated the church, by then called Highbridge Community Church, on November 16, 2010, after a public hearing on December 15, 2009. Three speakers backed it on behalf of the Historic Districts Council, the New York Landmarks Conservancy and Bronx Borough President Ruben Diaz Jr. The landmark site covers most of the lot but leaves out its easternmost 50 feet.
“Three people spoke in favor of designation: representatives of Bronx Borough President Ruben Diaz, Jr., the Historic Districts Council, and New York Landmarks Conservancy.”
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