Church of St. Paul The Apostle

History and architecture

The Church of St. Paul the Apostle, located at the southwest corner of Columbus Avenue and 60th Street in Manhattan, was built in 1875-85. Commissioned by the Missionary Society of St. Paul the Apostle, commonly called the Paulist Fathers, it is an austere and imposing Medieval Revival style design, loosely based on Gothic and Romanesque sources. The Paulists trace their origins to 1858 when Isaac Hecker traveled to Rome and received permission from Pope Pius IX to organize an American society of missionary priests.

The following year, Archbishop John Hughes of New York asked Hecker’s group to establish a parish on Manhattan’s Upper West Side and a simple brick church was constructed. The new parish quickly outgrew this building and in the mid-1870s a new structure was planned by Jeremiah O’Rourke, a New Jersey architect with various Catholic churches to his credit. George Deshon, a Paulist priest who trained at West Point as a military engineer, took over the project by the early 1880s and probably simplified O’Rourke’s original design.

The rock-faced grey granite stonework was salvaged from various structures in Manhattan, including sections of an embankment of the Croton Aqueduct that was originally on the Upper West side and the Croton Distributing Reservoir at 42nd Street, as well as Booth’s Theater, which stood at Sixth Avenue and 23rd Street until 1883. When the church was dedicated in January 1885, however, it was far from complete. The towers had yet to attain their current height and few major decorative features had been installed, including the jamb statues that flank the entrances and the stained glass windows.

The American muralist Lumen Martin Winter designed the impressive marble and mosaic bas-relief in the broad recess between the towers. Commissioned to celebrate the parish centenary in 1959, this colorful artwork depicts the “Conversion of Paul” on the road to Damascus. During the 1960s and 1970s, the parish struggled financially. With bankruptcy looming in 1973, a proposal to demolish the church and replace it with an apartment building was considered.

In the mid-1980s, however, only the west portion of the site was sold, as well as various development rights in 1984 and 2000. At this time, a major restoration of the Church of St. Paul the Apostle was begun and has been ongoing.