Rutgers Presbyterian Church

236 West 73rd Street | Upper West Side | built 1925

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.

1926
March 21
The Rutgers Presbyterian congregation dedicates its current church
The congregation traces its start to 1798, when Henry Rutgers donated land in lower Manhattan. After several moves it buys a lot at Broadway and 73rd Street in 1888 and builds a Romanesque Revival church there. In the 1920s it keeps a rear portion of the lot for a smaller English Gothic church at 236 West 73rd Street, designed by Henry Otis Chapman and dedicated on March 21, 1926.
Source: Daytonian in Manhattan
1938
November 20
The church commissions a mural of Christ that it later paints over
The church pays artist Alfred D. Crimi $6,800 to paint a mural titled Spreading the Gospel, unveiled November 20, 1938, showing a muscular Christ in a carpenter's shop. Uncomfortable with the imagery, the congregation paints over the mural in 1946, and a court rules in January 1949 that Crimi has no rights to the destroyed work.
Source: Daytonian in Manhattan

Nearby