Church Of St. Paul & St. Andrew

History and architecture

As the St. Paul's Methodist Episcopal Church and parish house at West End Avenue and West 86th Street neared completion, the New York Times of March 6, 1897 commented that the buildings comprised "one of the handsomest combinations of structures employed for such purposes by the Methodist Episcopal denomination in the United States. From the time of its completion in 1897 until today, St. Paul's Methodist Church, renamed the Church of St. Paul and St. Andrew in 1937 after its merger with the nearby St. Andrew's Methodist Episcopal Church, has been major architectural monument on Manhattan's Upper West Side. The church and parish house were designed in 1895 by one of America's most prominent Late nineteenth-century architects, R.H. Robertson.

The church is a key work in the architects career, reflecting a major shift from the picturesque Romanesque Revival style popular in the 1880s and early 1890s to the Classical- and Renaissance-inspired styles that dominated American architecture in the last years of the nineteenth century and opening decades of the twentieth. When it was completed, the bold octagonal campanile of St. Paul's towered over the surrounding rowhouse neighborhood. In the twentieth century, as tall apartment buildings began to replace the rowhouses, the church no longer dominated the skyline. That it remains a visual anchor in the area despite the change in relative scale is a tribute to the power of Robertson's conception.