American Gothic
This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.

Riverside Church, on Riverside Drive and 120th Street, remains one of the outstanding Gothic buildings in America. John D. Rockefeller Jr. built Riverside between 1926 and 1930 as an interdenominational Christian church for all New Yorkers. Whereas much of the Gothic renaissance of the 19th century we owe to liturgical reactionaries, Rockefeller’s love of Gothic reminds us that the style could be used to convey a spiritual richness that need not be wedded to dogma.
Rockefeller had previously hoped that the Cathedral of St. John the Divine, rising in Morningside Heights, would be the ecumenical “cathedral” that would fulfill his vision of eliminating the boundaries among the Christian sects. After all, the cathedral’s Bishop Manning had asked all New Yorkers to contribute to “their” cathedral. Heeding the bishop’s call, Rockefeller made a lavish donation. But when he requested to sit on the cathedral’s board, he was turned away for lack of Episcopalian credentials. He felt he had been taken in — and determined to build his very own dream church.
From his residence on 54th Street between Fifth and Sixth Avenues, Rockefeller had watched the beautiful St. Thomas Church go up on the corner of Fifth Avenue and 53rd Street. The architects, Ralph Adams Cram and Bertram Goodhue, were part of a Boston-based circle of Gothic architects and stained-glass artists whose highly imaginative and refined style is reflected in all the great 20th-century Gothic buildings in America, including St. John the Divine and the Washington National Cathedral. Rockefeller recruited Goodhue to design Rockefeller Memorial Chapel at the University of Chicago, and might have hired Goodhue for more jobs had he not died before certain important commissions took shape, including Riverside.
Rockefeller went with another of the Boston Gothicists, Charles Collens, who had helped design Park Avenue Baptist Church (now Central Presbyterian) on Park Avenue and 64th Street between 1920 and 1922. That was Rockefeller’s own church before he decided to build the interdenominational Riverside. Later in the 1930s, Rockefeller would hire Collens again to design the setting for the Cloisters, in Fort Tryon Park.
The prevailing notion that a church such as Riverside, because it does not employ medieval structural methods, is not “true Gothic” is debatable. I have little doubt that if the medieval builders had had steel construction at their disposal, they would have used it to achieve the same effects they accomplished through their revolutionary methods of stone construction. Gothic, in my view, is not about structure, so much as style, psychological effect, iconographic panoply, and spiritual experience. Gothic, like the classical, is a flexible, extensible language of design. In that sense, Riverside is true Gothic.
Thank goodness for that flexibility. The designers of Riverside had the same problem faced by James Renwick Jr. when he designed St. Patrick’s Cathedral (1858 – 79). That is, a Gothic church of massive scale had to be slotted into the Manhattan street grid. In true New York fashion, Renwick made up for horizontal constriction by going vertical, designing twin towers (completed 1888) that soar like nothing else in the city, compelling the eye heavenward as no medieval church builder succeeded so well in doing.
Riverside went St. Patrick’s one better. Though not even Rockefeller could alter the gridiron, he did use up two blocks of it (120th — 122nd streets, Claremont Avenue to Riverside Drive), in essence creating a “superblock” for his church. (121st Street is demapped west of Broadway, between which Claremont is the two-block campus of Union Theological Seminary, designed also by Charles Collens). This provided room enough not only for the church, but for a fantastically complex structure housing myriad church-related facilities, most of them in a 392-foot-high tower that, seated high upon a bluff overlooking the Hudson, ranks as perhaps the most imposing pile of stone on the Manhattan skyline. At tower’s top, the world’s largest carillon fills upper Manhattan with the aural equivalent of Riverside’s sumptuous Gothic nave.
As you’d expect, Riverside’s windows are very fine. The nave clerestory windows (above the aisle windows) include ones produced by Lorin of Chartres, the same firm that 50 years earlier made the spectacular aisle windows of St. Patrick’s Cathedral. For me, the most affecting of Riverside’s windows are in the ambulatory, the part circling round the rear of the chancel, where the altar is located. Right on axis with the central aisle, in the lower part of the wall, are two windows (separated by a large cross) called “Mercy.”These gorgeously colored lancets — vibrant reds and purples with yellow accents pop out of a background of “Chartres blue” — were the handiwork of Wright Goodhue. Cram once said of Wright Goodhue that for quality of line he was excelled only by Aubrey Beardsley. Alas, Goodhue, whose figures bespeak an intense religiosity, committed suicide at 26. His works exhibit a thorough assimilation of medieval values into a richly modern sensibility — the stained-glass equivalent of his uncle Bertram’s architecture.
Steel construction allowed Rockefeller to create a church of awe-inspiring dimensions to rival those of the still-unfinished St. John the Divine, and to do it in only four years. Collens, working with his firm of Allen & Collens and Henry Pelton, as well as an army of superb craftsmen, created a building whose grandeur equals any in New York. Every Sunday after Riverside’s service the church offers a free tour (starting around 12:15pm) led by their trained guides. I’ve met some of them, and their knowledge and passion for the building are truly infectious.