Statement of the Historic Districts Council
in support of the designation of Saint Aloysius Roman Catholic
Church as a New York City landmark
September 21, 2004
The Historic Districts Council is happy to support
the designation of St. Aloysius Church, which the Commission recognized
as long ago as 1966 as one of the most interesting of the many
churches in Harlem dating from the building boom associated with
the construction of the Lenox Avenue subway at the beginning of
the twentieth century. The resultant expectation that Harlem was
to be a star of the next real estate frontier for the upper middle
class led to construction of rows of what were expected to be
fashionable brownstones. Churches, too, were built in the latest
styles in what was in effect a genteel competition for parishioners,
and the resulting products of the boom remain as monuments of
the city’s history and of turn-of-the-twentieth- century
architecture.
The Historic Districts Council is glad to see
the Commission returning to Harlem, and we hope that the experience
of the Commission combined with the sensitivity to local voices
that the Chairman has shown in some other places can resolve some
of the conflicts and problems that have attended earlier approaches
to the area. Not only are individual designations required to
preserve the extraordinary architectural legacy of Harlem, like
the two churches before you and other striking religious edifices
currently threatened by decay or destruction such as St. Thomas
the Apostle, but also the extension of existing historic districts
like Mount Morris Park and the establishment of new ones.
The largely Renaissance-derived brownstone row
houses widely built in the area were considered in this period
the appropriate type of middle-class city dwellings, and similarly
the then dominant architectural concept of appropriateness of
particular styles for particular building types decreed Gothic
for churches. What “proper Gothic” included had, however,
widened considerably from the days of the Camden Society with
the increase in historic knowledge, the necessity of accommodation
to varying types of religious demands, and the enthusiastic if
not always coherent eloquence of such writers as Ruskin. The Renwick
family were prominent participants in this process in New York,
and their progress can be traced through such monuments as the
correct English Gothic of Grace Church, a freer adaptation of
continental Gothic in Saint Patrick’s Cathedral, later even
freer versions in All Saints Church—also on the designation
agenda today—and almost at the end of the line, late Italian
Gothic here at Saint Aloysius by William Renwick of the second
generation.
This extraordinary building has been rather fancifully
compared to the Certosa or Charterhouse near Pavia in the extravagance
of its ornament and the transitional position between Gothic and
Renaissance—most visible in the interior in both cases.
The church follows traditional Gothic in general form and major
elements, but the elaborate treatment of the façade is
in tension between this framework and the strongly horizontal
elements of a decorative scheme that owes more to the Renaissance.
This includes colored bands, somewhat dulled by dirt and time,
that strive to contain the restless, vigorously twisted and interlaced
elements of the moldings and arcades. The head of Christ crowned
with thorns rising in the gable above the ironwork cross set in
front of the rose window and the object of adoration by a pair
of plaques with Renaissance angels above the side doors has strong
symbolic power. The interior, which of course is outside the jurisdiction
of this Commission, is handsome and contains a parallel representation
of Christ’s triumph over Satan executed by the architect
in a fresco technique of his own devising.
Both for its position within the development
of Gothic form by a family of architects and as for its own quality
the church if Saint Aloysius richly deserves designation.
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