Ruined Serbian Orthodox Church Was a Landmark of Old New York
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Version 0 of 1. Standing in ruin on Monday near Madison Square Park was not only a hub of Serbian life in New York City. Standing in ruin was a landmark of old New York. Standing in ruin, too, was a symbol of restless Manhattan; a spiritual home for wealthy Episcopalians, the lost souls of the notorious Tenderloin and generations of Orthodox Christians, who knew it as the Cathedral of St. Sava. Peter II, the last king of Yugoslavia, attended services there. In this brownstone house of worship at 15 West 25th Street — now scorched and roofless after a fire on Sunday — Edith Newbold Jones was married in April 1885 to Edward Robbins Wharton. At the time, the building was a “chapel of ease,” built and run by the parish of Trinity Church on Wall Street to serve the gentry Mrs. Wharton would later write about: well-to-do society families who had deserted Lower Manhattan for the pleasant upper reaches of the city, in the East and West 20s. “To provide for the return of a portion at least of our faithful and long-tried friends, it was thought expedient to build a new church at their very door,” the rector of Trinity Church, the Rev. William Berrian, said at the dedication of Trinity Chapel in April 1855. Richard Upjohn was the architect of both the Wall Street mother church and the 25th Street chapel, which the Landmarks Preservation Commission called a rugged version of English Gothic Revival, “reinforced with large buttresses which give it both durability and permanence.” Prophetically, Trinity Chapel was the setting in 1865 for what The New York Times described as the “first public celebration of the Russian (or Greek) church, not only in this city, but on the American continent.” The wedding in 1885 of Pussy Jones and Teddy Wharton, as they were called by family and friends, was a quiet affair. It may have been the happiest day of the troubled marriage, which ended in divorce in 1913. It was in 1914 that Trinity’s leaders decided to close the chapel, which was now surrounded by the bad elements of the Tenderloin, a shadowy realm of hotels, saloons, gambling dens and whorehouses. The Rev. Joseph Wilson Sutton was supposed to wind things down as the priest in charge. Instead, surprising everyone, he breathed new life into Trinity Chapel. Enrollment grew. A Sunday school was re-established. Spiritual healing services were introduced, as was a school for organists. By the start of World War II, however, Trinity parish could no longer afford to keep the chapel open. The property was sold in 1943 to the fledgling Serbian Eastern Orthodox Church of St. Sava, led by the Very Rev. Doushan J. Shoukletovich. A year later, it was elevated to become the first Serbian Orthodox cathedral in America. Lending instant luster to the new cathedral were King Peter II and Queen Alexandra, in exile from Yugoslavia, which abolished the monarchy in 1945. “The thousands of displaced Serbians who are starving and homeless in Europe look to this king as a symbol of unity,” Father Shoukletovich said at the Easter service of 1948. St. Sava suffered its first big structural trauma in 1966, when a bomb exploded at Communist Party headquarters, across West 26th Street from the north side of the cathedral. Whole sections of stained-glass were shattered by the blast. But they were later replaced with Byzantine-style windows. Resilience seems to play a large role in the history of St. Sava’s. Make of this what you will, but on Monday the great cross over the entrance was still standing against the sky. |