page_title: West-Park Presbyterian Church
section_title: Preservation
hierarchical_section_title: West-Park Presbyterian Church / Preservation
context_page_description: West-Park Presbyterian Church is a Romanesque Revival Presbyterian church located on the corner of Amsterdam Avenue at 86th Street on the Upper West Side of Manhattan in New York City. It consists of a main sanctuary and chapel.
context_section_description: In the 1980s, the church was re-pointed with cement, which has resulted in substantial erosion of the soft sandstone. Around the same time, the church installed a new elevator for handicap accessibility in the parish house (the original chapel).
  In the early 2000s, the congregation hired a developer to address their financial situation, diminished attendance, and role in society. Their findings proposed the replacement of the complex with an eighteen- to twenty-three-story residential tower and a smaller new corner glass church, designed by the architectural firm of Franke, Gottsegen & Cox.  The design featured a “prow-shaped base of stone,” with a sweeping 125-foot glass carillon tower providing “a luminous well of light.” The current social outreach and education facilities would be doubled and the modern design, the architects asserted, would create a sense of refuge and “communitarian communality.” The architects described the design: "...the crisscrossing of the structure, like a canopy of trees, but you won’t be able to see the top, which we think is an expression of sacredness,” adding, “the sanctuary is very flexible and interfaith use is possible so that space can be shared with other denominations.”
  In response, activists organized the “Friends of West-Park” to protest the development while concurrently working toward a viable alternative plan as well as funds. The group principally feared the loss of air and light with the new tower. The co-chairman of Friends of West-Park stated that the group was not interested “in telling the church that it had to maintain itself for the community good without the community taking some role [but instead they] formed a development company capable of doing what [they] say and working on a partnership with the church.” The "Friends" suggested selling Eidlitz's chapel for redevelopment to a non-profit, probably a school, to offset the cost of renovation, with neighboring buildings preparing to lease air rights. Most of the external walls would be preserved, restoring the sandstone and stained glass but not the original roof shape nor the forty-foot interior, which would be gutted. Its sanctuary would be raised to gallery level and fitted with movable seating; since divided windows already exist, the alteration would not be externally evident, leaving the commercially ideal ground floor for other uses, possibly social outreach or educational. One architect responsible for the sympathetic second plan explained that “successful rehabilitation allows the character and original intent of the first architect to come through. So the question is, If not every square inch is sacred turf, how much modification can the structure bear without losing what makes it special?” Rev. Brashear of West-Park was quoted as receptive to the community input but stated that the congregation, trustees, and various levels of the Presbytery are still deciding the unprotected church’s fate.
  The congregation moved to share space in 2008 with the neighboring Renaissance Revival-styled, Saints Paul and Andrew United Methodist Church (1897), protected as a city landmark and itself a product of a 1937 denominational merger.
  The church was finally declared a landmark by the New York City Landmarks Preservation Commission on January 12, 2010.
caption: 1893
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