If ever you should despair of New York, there’s a quick antidote. Stand mid-block on the east side of Fifth Avenue between 53rd and 54th Streets. Look across the avenue. Turn your head slightly to the left. You will see St. Thomas Church, at the northwest corner of 53rd Street. Turn your head slightly to the right, and you will see the University Club, at the northwest corner of 54th Street. These are two buildings that of their type, size, and style are as good as anything you could hope to see, two buildings that should lay to rest any qualms about whether New York can help sustain your soul.

The two buildings date from roughly the same period of architecture, but represent twin poles of architectural aspiration, united only by the utmost in quality. St. Thomas Church opened in 1913, a halcyon year in New York architecture: Grand Central Terminal, the Woolworth Building, and Ebbets Field all opened that year. The church replaced an earlier St. Thomas on the site.

The architects of the new church were the firm of Cram, Ferguson & Goodhue. Ralph Adams Cram was an ideological Gothicist and a devout churchman, part of the Boston-based late phase of the Gothic Revival that had as its manifesto, if you will, Henry Adams’s book “Mont Saint Michel and Chartres.” (Subtitled “A Study in Thirteenth-Century Unity,” Adams’s book was privately printed in 1905, the year St. Thomas was designed.) Cram’s designs tended to be academically stolid, exemplified not least by his Gothic redesign of the Cathedral of St. John the Divine. Often impressive, Cram’s churches nonetheless often just missed uplifting the spirit. His partner Bertram Goodhue, on the other hand, was – paradoxically – an agnostic whose churches were enough to make a believer of anyone. Cram said his firm’s works were not a “revival” of Gothic, but part of a centuries-long continuum of Gothic – and Christian – architecture. Yet it was Goodhue whose Gothic represented a true evolution of the style for modern times. And St. Thomas, arguably New York’s loveliest church, is the work of Goodhue.

The exterior is impressive, in the way the Kentucky limestone mass anchors its corner with a single strong tower, and in the intricately sculpted stone facades on Fifth and on 53rd. It is inside, however, that the church comes true, in a space of quiet, cool majesty. Your vision is immediately riveted by a reredos larger than any from the Middle Ages, and as splendid as you’ll ever see. Designed by Goodhue’s sculptor Lee Lawrie, the screen, of Wisconsin sandstone, features some 60 figures of persons important to the worshippers at St. Thomas, from Augustine of Hippo to William Laud to William Gladstone.

At any time, St. Thomas offers meditative respite from the hurly-burly of Fifth Avenue. But like any great church, it should be seen during a service, especially when the boys’ choir performs. It is one of New York’s great experiences.

I will write about the University Club in next week’s column.

fmorrone@nysun.com