Society for Ethical Culture Meeting House

33 Central Park West | also 2 West 64th Street | Lincoln Square | built 1914

Open on the map6 entries

The lot about 1940
About 1940. Via 1940s.nyc
The lot about 1985
About 1985. Via 80s.nyc

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.

  1. 1910

    October

    The Society for Ethical Culture dedicates its meeting house

    Architect Robert D. Kohn filed plans in June 1909 for a $300,000 meeting house, and it was dedicated in October 1910. The society founded by Felix Adler used it for lectures and debates; in 1915 it hosted a meeting of the NAACP, which the society had helped to found, and Adler's funeral was held here in April 1933.

    Source: Daytonian in Manhattan

  2. 1912

    October 21

    A couple marries without traditional vows at the meeting house

    Hilda Matzner and Louis O. Schwartz marry at the Ethical Culture meeting house in a ceremony that dispenses with traditional religious vows, reflecting the society's secular, humanist approach to ritual. The wedding comes roughly two years after the Central Park West meeting house opens, and similar non-traditional ceremonies follow there in the years after.

    Source: Daytonian in Manhattan

  3. 1915

    The meeting house hosts an NAACP gathering

    The recently opened Ethical Culture meeting house hosts a meeting of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, reflecting the society's involvement in progressive causes of the era. The building had already become a venue for lectures and public gatherings well beyond the Ethical Culture Society's own membership.

    Source: Daytonian in Manhattan

  4. 1918

    March 25

    Suffragist Harriet Stanton Blatch speaks on women's war work

    Harriet Stanton Blatch, daughter of Elizabeth Cady Stanton and a leading suffragist, delivers a speech at the meeting house on women's contributions to the American war effort during World War I. The talk is one of many public programs the Ethical Culture Society hosts there on social and political issues of the day.

    Source: Daytonian in Manhattan

  5. 1933

    April 27

    The meeting house holds Felix Adler's funeral

    The Society for Ethical Culture holds the funeral of its founder, Felix Adler, who dies in April 1933 at age 81, at the Central Park West meeting house dedicated in October 1910. Adler had launched the Ethical Culture movement in 1876 and incorporated the society the following year.

    Source: Daytonian in Manhattan

  6. 1980

    New York's highest court upholds the meeting house's landmark status

    The Society for Ethical Culture wanted to demolish the meeting house and its neighbor and rebuild to get the most value from the property, and it challenged the city's landmark designation as an unconstitutional restriction. In 1980 the New York Court of Appeals decided the case, Society for Ethical Culture v. Spatt, in the city's favor, keeping protection for what has been called the nation's first Art Nouveau building.

    Source: quimbee.com

Further reading

Nearby

All 48 buildings with stories in Lincoln Square