Messiah Home for Children
1741 Andrews Avenue South | Morris Heights | built 1907
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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.
- 1902
Henry H. Rogers buys the Lewis G. Morris estate on Mount Fordham for the Messiah Home
Standard Oil industrialist Henry H. Rogers bought this land between 176th and 177th Streets in 1902 and later gave it to the Messiah Home for Children, an orphanage whose board his wife had led. The hilltop was once Lewis G. Morris's estate, and the home used his Italian villa, Fordham Manor, for several years before the present building replaced it.
- 1905
Henry Rogers picks Charles Brigham of Boston to design a larger orphanage
In 1905 Rogers, the home's benefactor, commissioned Charles Brigham, who had designed many buildings in Rogers' hometown of Fairhaven, Massachusetts. Brigham chose the Jacobethan Revival style, giving the building towers, turrets, curved Flemish gables and many transomed windows, details he had also used on Fairhaven High School in 1904. Mrs. Rogers closely supervised the design.
- 1908
Orphans march across the lawn from the old mansion to open the new Messiah Home
The building was dedicated in March 1908 in a ceremony in which the children left the old Morris mansion and walked across the lawn into their new home. It opened with 60 children, rising to 75 by 1911, with a gymnasium and carpenter's shop in the basement, classrooms and dining rooms on the first floor, and dormitories above.
“…was dedicated in March 1908 with a ceremony marked by the children leaving the old mansion and marching across the lawn to the new…”
- 1920
The Salvation Army moves its cadet training school into the former orphanage
The Salvation Army bought the former Messiah Home in 1920, and its Training School for Cadets arrived from Manhattan that April, training about 200 officers a year for 22 eastern and southern states. The Army added a five-story dormitory in 1958-60 and stayed until 1975.
- 1978
New York City and the Labor Department restore the empty building as a Job Corps center
After sitting vacant for several years, the building was taken over in 1978 by the City of New York and the U.S. Department of Labor and rehabilitated as the South Bronx Job Corps Center. The architects Castro-Blanco, Piscioneri & Feder cleaned and repaired the masonry, replaced windows and roof shingles, and recreated the copper trim in a copper-like material.
“In 1978 the City of New York and the United States Department of Labor joined to rehabilitate the structure as a Job Corps training center.”
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