Riverside Church

• 1. Introduction

  ›

  Riverside Church stands on the western edge of Morningside Heights in Manhattan, its 392-foot tower visible from the Hudson River and audible, via a 74-bell carillon, from up to 8 miles away. The bourdon bell at the top of that carillon is the world's largest tuned bell, weighing 20 tons. The building below it houses a 250-seat movie theater, a full-size basketball court, 80 classrooms, and a congregation whose members come from more than forty ethnic groups. None of that was inevitable. In the 1920s, Riverside Church did not exist. Its story begins with a wealthy Baptist, a reluctant preacher, and a decision to plant a deliberately interdenominational church in a neighborhood ringed by universities. The questions worth asking are: how did a single philanthropist's ambition produce one of the tallest and heaviest carillon towers in the world, and how did a church conceived for progressive religious ideals become a platform for some of the most consequential speeches and controversies of the twentieth century?

• 2. From Fifth Avenue to Morningside

  ›

  The congregation that became Riverside Church traces its roots to the Mulberry Street Baptist Church, established in 1823 by a group of sixteen congregants on Manhattan's Lower East Side. Over the following decades, the congregation moved through at least three locations on the Lower East Side and two on Broadway before settling at Fifth Avenue and 46th Street in the 1860s. William Rockefeller, brother of John D. Rockefeller, became a major financial backer of what was then called the Fifth Avenue Baptist Church in the 1870s, and both brothers later became trustees.

  By the early twentieth century, Fifth Avenue was filling with commercial buildings and the church itself had grown dilapidated. The congregation sold its old headquarters in 1919 and acquired land at Park Avenue and 63rd Street the following year. John D. Rockefeller Jr. funded half of the projected one-million-dollar construction cost. The Park Avenue Baptist Church held its last service at the Fifth Avenue location on the 3rd of April, 1922, and classes began at the new Park Avenue building the following week.

  But the move to Park Avenue proved to be only a way station. In 1924, Rockefeller donated five hundred thousand dollars to the Cathedral of St. John the Divine in Morningside Heights in an attempt to steer the cathedral toward a more progressive theology, and that effort failed. The following January, Harry E. Edmonds, who ran the International House in Morningside Heights, wrote to Rockefeller proposing a new church in the neighborhood, and suggested progressive pastor Harry Emerson Fosdick should lead it. Fosdick had already turned Rockefeller down several times, saying he did not want to be known as the pastor of the richest man in the country. He eventually agreed in May 1925, on the conditions that the church would move to Morningside Heights, adopt religious liberalism, drop the baptism requirement for membership, and become nondenominational. Fifteen percent of congregants voted against Fosdick's appointment, but under his leadership the congregation doubled in size by 1930. Of the 158 people who joined in the year after Fosdick arrived, roughly half were not Baptists.

• 3. Building on Riverside Drive

  ›

  Rockefeller chose the southeastern corner of Riverside Drive and 122nd Street for the new church, a site that overlooked Riverside Park to the west and Claremont Park to the north, and that he felt would be visible to people using Riverside Drive and the adjacent Hudson River waterway. He finalized the purchase in May 1925 and assembled a frontage of 250 feet on Riverside Drive, clearing apartments and mansions that occupied the land.

  Rather than hold an open architectural competition, Rockefeller privately solicited plans from several firms, hoping to avoid publicity. The winning submission came from Allen and Collens and Henry C. Pelton, the same team that had designed the Park Avenue Baptist Church. Their plan called for a Gothic Revival church with its main entrance facing Riverside Drive rather than the street at the back of the nave. The building committee stripped out proposed apartment towers for the neighboring Union Theological Seminary, and in February 1926 the architects were formally selected. The approved plans called for a 392-foot bell tower and a 2,400-seat auditorium.

  Pelton and Collens traveled to France to identify a model for the design and settled on the thirteenth-century Chartres Cathedral. Chartres would provide what they called the fundamental principles of the design, though Riverside would have a completely different outline. The three main Riverside Drive entrances and the absence of decorative elements on the facade between the portals both derive from Chartres. The single massive tower was inspired by Chartres' two western towers.

  Construction began on the 21st of November, 1927, when the ceremonial cornerstone was laid. The cornerstone contained items including Woelfkin's Bible and New York Times articles about the new church. In late 1928, fires broke out after wooden scaffolding ignited; a blaze on the 22nd of December, 1928, caused a million dollars in damage and nearly destroyed the interior, though the exterior remained mostly intact. Insurance covered much of the loss. Rockefeller donated 1.5 million dollars after the fire, which combined with the 1.5 million dollars the Park Avenue building had sold for provided three million dollars to continue. The congregation worshipped temporarily at Temple Beth-El on Fifth Avenue and 76th Street for nine months starting in July 1929. The first service in the completed church was held on the 5th of October, 1930, attended by 3,200 people; thousands more wanted entry. Rockefeller spent a total of 10.5 million dollars on land acquisition and construction.

• 4. The Architecture of Ambition

  ›

  Riverside Church is the tallest church in the United States, its tower rising 392 feet. The Gothic exterior wraps a modern interior: steel framing and curtain walls carry the building's load, while limestone from Indiana clads the nave. Fosdick himself said the exterior Gothic style is suited to make people pray, and that the church had not outgrown Gothic in that regard.

  The nave measures 100 feet high, 89 feet wide, and 215 feet long, and was inspired by Albi Cathedral in France. Its vaulted ceilings are lined with Guastavino terracotta tiles. The ceilings above the chancel and the two northernmost bays carry a brownish tint because a sealant applied in 1953 has turned yellow over time. The chancel floor contains a labyrinth inlaid in three types of marble, modeled on a similar design at Chartres.

  The main entrance on Riverside Drive is topped with five concentric archivolts containing sculptures of prophets and followers of Jesus. The third arch depicts philosophers including Ralph Waldo Emerson, Immanuel Kant, and Pythagoras; the second arch depicts scientists including Albert Einstein, Charles Darwin, and Hippocrates. Einstein's inclusion was controversial when the church was completed, because he was still living and Jewish, while the other figures depicted had died. According to the publication Church Monthly, the iconography committee had originally proposed 20 scientists without Einstein, but the faculty unanimously decided he belonged among the 14 leading scientists of all time.

  The chancel screen at the back of the chancel is carved from Caen stone and depicts influential figures including Johann Sebastian Bach, Abraham Lincoln, Michelangelo, Florence Nightingale, and Booker T. Washington. The building's 51 stained glass windows in the main building exclude small grisaille windows; 34 of those are in the nave. French glassmakers Jacques Simon from Reims Cathedral and Charles Lorin from Chartres Cathedral made the clerestory windows, with Lorin designing the western side and Simon the eastern. The other nave windows were created by Boston-based firm Reynolds, Francis and Rohnstock and depict 138 scenes.

  Critics divided sharply on the result. Walter A. Taylor, a Columbia architecture professor, believed the design should have been more modernist. A writer for the 1939 WPA Guide to New York City argued that the tower's detailing makes the building seem smaller than it is, so that its scale is scarcely impressive even at close range. Architect Eric Nash, in his book Manhattan Skyscrapers, called Riverside Church Manhattan's last great eclectic skyscraper, while the AIA Guide to New York City described it as easily the most prominent architectural work along the Hudson River from midtown to the George Washington Bridge.

• 5. The World's Heaviest Carillon

  ›

  Near the top of the tower, on the twenty-third floor, hangs the feature that makes Riverside Church unique among the world's bell towers. The carillon's 74 bronze bells, together with their associated mechanisms, weigh a combined 500,000 pounds, making it the largest carillon in the world by aggregate weight. The bourdon, the lowest bell, weighs 20 tons and measures 122 inches across; it sounds one octave lower than other bourdons and is the world's largest tuned bell.

  The carillon's origins go back to the Park Avenue Baptist Church, which had a 53-bell carillon made by English founders Gillett and Johnston. In April 1928, the church announced the carillon would be expanded to 72 bells upon moving to Riverside Drive, which at the time would make it the largest set of bells in the world. When the church opened in 1930, a further 19 bells had been added for the new building. Two more bells were added in 1955, and 58 treble bells were replaced by bell founders Van Bergen. Whitechapel Bell Foundry replaced the bells again in 2004. The bells can reportedly be heard from up to 8 miles from the tower.

  The carillon is dedicated to Laura Spelman Rockefeller, the mother of John D. Rockefeller Jr. The weight of the instrument required the heaviest steel beams used anywhere in the construction of Riverside Church. The north facade of the tower, which overhangs the nave, is supported by a single cross truss weighing 60 short tons. The observation deck above the carillon was closed after the 11th of September 2001, attacks due to security concerns, but the church resumed tours in January 2020.

• 6. Activism from the Pulpit

  ›

  Fosdick had envisioned the church as interdenominational, interracial, and international from the beginning, and the building became a site of national political life as quickly as it became a place of worship. By 1939, over 10,000 people a week were attending its social and religious services, athletic events, and employment programs, and the church had more than 200 staff.

  On the 4th of April, 1967, a year before his assassination, Martin Luther King Jr. delivered a speech at Riverside Church called Beyond Vietnam: A Time to Break Silence, in which he voiced his opposition to the war. The wing to the south of the original building, completed in 1959, was renamed for him in 1985. In November 1969, civil rights leader James Forman interrupted a sermon at the church, citing it as one of several churches from which Black Americans could seek reparations for slavery. This led the church to release its financial figures publicly for the first time in 1970; those figures valued the building at 86 million dollars and the total financial endowment at 18 million dollars. The church also created a 450,000-dollar Fund for Social Justice to disburse reparations over three years.

  William Sloane Coffin served as senior minister from 1977 to 1987, a period defined by theologically liberal sermons and a sharp recovery in membership. When Coffin was selected, the congregation had been declining for several years; by the end of 1979, membership had risen to 2,627, and total annual attendance at morning services climbed from 49,902 in 1976 to 71,536 in 1978. Coffin left to become president of the disarmament organization SANE/Freeze. His successor, James A. Forbes, became the church's first Black senior minister after the congregation voted almost unanimously for his appointment in February 1989. At the time, between one-fourth and one-third of the congregation was Black or Hispanic.

  The church's LGBT ministry, Maranatha, was founded in 1978 in response to growing demand from gay and lesbian congregants. During the height of the HIV/AIDS epidemic in New York City in the 1980s, there was a backlash against Maranatha because the LGBT community was negatively associated with the epidemic, which led to the founding of a separate HIV/AIDS ministry. In 2011, Riverside Church donated tents to Occupy Wall Street protesters and sheltered them during cold and inclement weather and after the evacuation of Zuccotti Park. More than two dozen lawsuits from 27 plaintiffs were filed against the church under New York State's Child Victims Act of 2019, concerning the longtime director of the church's Riverside Hawks basketball program, who stepped down in 2002 after being accused of sexual abuse. The first suit under that act was brought to trial in January 2026.

• 7. Preservation and the Present

  ›

  In the late 1990s, as the church weighed a major expansion on its eastern side, a faction of congregants petitioned the New York City Landmarks Preservation Commission to protect the original building. The proposal was controversial partly because the nomination excluded the Martin Luther King Jr. Wing, despite preservationists' requests for the entire structure to be considered. The congregation voted in December 1998 to officially nominate the church for landmark status, and the Landmarks Preservation Commission approved designation for the original church in May 2000. In 2012, the church and its annexes were listed on the National Register of Historic Places.

  Financial turbulence defined the early twenty-first century. An allegation of financial mismanagement centered on a 32-million-dollar decrease in the endowment between 2000 and 2002 produced years of court cases, though the New York Supreme Court dismissed a lawsuit on the topic. Brad Braxton, who became the sixth senior minister in August 2008, faced a lawsuit over his salary, which a church spokesperson stated was 457,000 dollars; Braxton resigned in June 2009 after less than a year. For the five years that followed, the church had no senior minister, and by 2014, the congregation had declined to 1,670, a loss of over a thousand members since 2007.

  Amy K. Butler became the seventh senior minister and the first woman to hold the position, selected in June 2014. In September 2018, the church announced it would purchase the neighboring McGiffert Hall at Claremont Avenue and 122nd Street for 45 million dollars, a building on land John Rockefeller Jr. had donated to Union Theological Seminary and for which the church held a right of first offer. The Director of Music and organist today is Nathaniel Gumbs, inheriting a post whose past holders include Virgil Fox, who served from 1946 to 1965 and whose direction guided the replacement of the chancel organ by Aeolian-Skinner in 1953-1954, culminating in an opening concert in March 1955 with the New York Philharmonic Symphony Orchestra before 3,000 people.