Mother African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church

History and architecture

In 1914, when Mother Zion moved to Harlem, the black population of that community was centered on the streets of the West 130s, between Fifth and Eighth avenues. Not just Mother Zion, but others of New York's most prominent African-American churches followed their congregants to Harlem and opened new churches in the heart of this new black settlement. Among the prestigious congregations that moved to the area were St. Philip's Episcopal Church which erected a new building on West 134th Street between Seventh and Eighth avenues in 1910-11, and Abyssinian Baptist Church which moved to West 138th Street between Lenox and Seventh avenues in 1923.

In addition to the historic black churches that moved to Harlem, new congregations were founded in the community. Both the old and new congregations grew rapidly in Harlem and, as the number of congregants increased, larger sanctuaries were needed. As Mother Zion had done in 1914, many of the congregations purchased the imposing church buildings thai had been erected in the late nineteenth century by white congregations, but were being abandoned by those organizations as their members fled from Harlem."

In the early 1920s, Mother Zion purchased three buildings (a pair of small three-story rowhouses and a one-story frame building) on West 137th Street, immediately north of its 136th Street church. These buildings were demolished and architect George W. Foster, Jr., was commissioned to design a new church buiiding.'^ George Washington Foster, Jr. (1866-1923) was one of the first professional black architects registered in the United States and one of only 59 black architects (of a total of 16,613 architects) recorded in the 1910 United States census.'^

Very little about Foster's early life and career can be stated with certainty. His descendants believe that he was bom in Newark, New Jersey, the son of a carriage striper.^ Foster is said to have studied architecture at Cooper Union in New York in the late 1880s.He is then believed to have worked for some years as a draftsman in the office of Henry Hardenbergh, one of New York City's leading late nineteenth-century architects.

During that period, the Hardenbergh office was responsible for the design of such prominent buildings as the Waldorf (1890-93) and Astoria (1896) hotels on Fifth Avenue between 33rd and 34th streets (both demolished), the American Fine Arts Society Building (1891-92) on West 57th Street, the John Wolfe Building (1894-95; demolished) on Maiden Lane, and the Manhattan Hotel (1895-96; demolished) on East 42nd Street. He is also said to have worked, in 1903, for Daniel Bumham & Co. on the Flatiron Building.

Early in the twentieth century Foster apparently established his own architectural practice in New Jersey. In 1902, he moved into a house of his own design at 102 Colony Avenue in Park Ridge. In 1908, when New Jersey began registering architects, Foster became one of two black men to be so registered Foster was registered in New York in 1916.

From about 1908 to about 1915, Foster was in partnership with Vertner Tandy. Tandy, who was nineteen years younger than Foster, received his architectural degree at Cornell in 1907; he is generally considered to be the first black architect registered in New York Stated The most important building designed by the firm of Tandy & Foster was the neo-Gothic style St. Philip's Episcopal Church (1910-11) on West 134th Street. After the partnership with Tandy ended, Foster continued to work independently* Mother A.M.E. Zion Church was the most important commission of Foster's late career. Sadly, he died shortly after the design was completed.

For Mother A.M.E. Zion Church, Foster designed an impressive church building in the neo-Gothic style. The choice of a Gothic-inspired design reflects the popularity of this mode for early twentieth-century church design in America. In the mid-nineteenth century, many Protestant denominations in America had rejected the Gothic and its associations with Roman Catholic and Episcopal doctrine, in favor of designs based on Romanesque precedents. However, by the turn of the century, the popularity of the Romanesque Revival had waned and most Christian denominations returned to an exploration of the Gothic.^ Architects such as Ralph Adams Cram and Henry Vaughan promoted a return to the use of medieval design by all Christian denominations as the architectural means of reflecting a return to universal Christian values.