Content area
Full text
Some dozen years ago, I began in collaboration with David Holmes, Dewey Wallace, Charles Wallace, and others to conduct tours of houses of worship during the annual meetings of the American Academy of Religion and the American Society of Church History. The challenge of these tours for me gradually metamorphosed from providing basic information on dates, architectural styles, and parish history highlights-all useful enough in themselves-to reading these buildings in the broader context of the urban built environment. Churches, synagogues, and other religious buildings do not appear in the vacuum that a slide presentation or text illustration might suggest. Rather, they are in a continual mute dialogue with their surroundings, which in the urban context tend to be other buildings of commercial or civic purpose. The context is also four-dimensional. Not only do religious buildings themselves undergo expansion, remodeling, and changes in denominational identity, but their neighbors frequently change even more rapidly.
I. FROM CLASSICAL MEETINGHOUSE TO GOTHIC CHURCH
My theme for this address is the nature of this dialogue as it played itself out in the heyday of the American city, especially from the vast expansion of urban population and life that commenced in the age of the New Immigration and massive industrialization in the decades following the Civil War, to the abrupt slowdown in economic and building activity precipitated by the Great Depression of the 1930s. A good place to start, which we shall revisit in a very different context somewhat later, is New Haven, Connecticut, in the second decade of the nineteenth century. The popular image of New England usually involves crisp white neoclassical meetinghouses on tidily kept village greens. This picture-postcard quality, however, was hardly characteristic of the Puritan era, and did not begin to manifest itself until urbanization and concomitant gentrification commenced around the time of Presidents Madison and Monroe. The town green, which previously had served higgledy-piggledy for livestock grazing and firewood gathering, was rationalized, tidied up, and rendered an appropriate backdrop for the new wave of modish building that was taking place in what is now the heart of downtown New Haven.'
Antebellum engravings give us a picture of the green as it looked around 1820.2 Now absent is the Greek revival state capitol, a reminder of Connecticut's...