Riverside Church

Riverside Church is an interdenominational church in the Morningside Heights neighborhood of Manhattan in New York City, United States. The church is associated with the American Baptist Churches USA and the United Church of Christ. It was conceived by philanthropist businessman and Baptist John D. Rockefeller Jr. in conjunction with Baptist minister Harry Emerson Fosdick as a large, interdenominational church in Morningside Heights, which is surrounded by academic institutions.

The church occupies the block bounded by Riverside Drive, Claremont Avenue, 120th Street, and 122nd Street near Columbia University's Morningside Heights campus and across from Grant's Tomb. The original building opened in 1930; it was designed by Henry C. Pelton and Allen & Collens in the Neo-Gothic style. It contains a nave consisting of five architectural bays; a chancel at the front of the nave; a 22-story, 392-foot (119 m) tower above the nave; a narthex and chapel; and a cloistered passageway that connects to the eastern entrance on Claremont Avenue. Near the top of the tower is the church's main feature, a 74-bell carillon—the heaviest in the world—dedicated to Rockefeller Jr.'s mother Laura Spelman Rockefeller. A seven-story wing was built to the south of the original building in 1959 to a design by Collens, Willis & Beckonert, and was renamed for Martin Luther King Jr. in 1985. The Stone Gym to the southeast, built in 1915 as a dormitory, was designed by Louis E. Jallade and was converted to a gymnasium in 1962.

Riverside Church has been a focal point of global and national activism since its inception, and it has a long history of social justice in adherence to Fosdick's original vision of an "interdenominational, interracial, and international" church. Its congregation includes members of more than forty ethnic groups. The church was designated as a city landmark by the New York City Landmarks Preservation Commission in 2000 and was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 2012.

Several small Baptist congregations, including the Mulberry Street Baptist Church that was established in 1823 by a group of 16 congregants, were founded in Manhattan after the American Revolutionary War. The Mulberry Street church occupied at least three locations on the Lower East Side and two locations on Broadway in Midtown Manhattan before moving to a more permanent site at Fifth Avenue and 46th Street in the 1860s. The businessman William Rockefeller was the first of several Rockefeller family members to attend the Fifth Avenue Baptist Church; he became a major financial backer of the church in the 1870s. William and his brother John D. Rockefeller later became trustees of the church and many of its services were held at the Rockefellers' home nearby.

Cornelius Woelfkin, who became the church's minister in 1912, started leading the church in a more modernist direction. By the early 20th century, Fifth Avenue was experiencing increased commercial development and the church building became dilapidated. The congregation sold its old headquarters in 1919 and bought land at Park Avenue and 63rd Street the following year. John Rockefeller's son John D. Rockefeller Jr. funded half of the projected $1 million cost. The new church, which was dubbed the "Little Cathedral", was designed by Henry C. Pelton in partnership with Francis R. Allen and Charles Collens. The final service in the Fifth Avenue location was held on April 3, 1922, and the renamed Park Avenue Baptist Church held its first class in the new location the next week.

In 1924, John D. Rockefeller Jr. donated $500,000 to the Cathedral of St. John the Divine in Morningside Heights, which was further uptown from the Park Avenue location, in an unsuccessful attempt to influence the cathedral's ideology in a progressive direction. The following January, Harry E. Edmonds—leader of the International House in Morningside Heights for whose construction Rockefeller had provided funds—wrote to Rockefeller to propose creating a new church in the neighborhood. Edmonds suggested progressive pastor Harry Emerson Fosdick should head such a church. Rockefeller then told the Park Avenue Baptist Church's leaders about the plan and hired an agent to inspect the planned church site.

Woelfkin quit in mid-May 1925 and Rockefeller Jr. immediately started looking for a new minister, ultimately deciding on Fosdick, who had declined Rockefeller's offers several times, saying he did not "want to be known as the pastor of the richest man in the country". Fosdick stated he would accept the minister position on the conditions that the church would move to Morningside Heights, follow a policy of religious liberalism, remove the requirement for members to be baptized, and become nondenominational. At the end of May 1925, Fosdick agreed to become minister of the Park Avenue Baptist Church. Only fifteen percent of congregants voted against Fosdick's appointment.

Under Fosdick's leadership, the congregation doubled in size by 1930. The new members were diverse; of the 158 people who joined in the year after Fosdick became minister, about half were not Baptists. Though some existing congregants had doubts about whether the Park Avenue Baptist Church should move from its recently completed edifice, the church's board, which was in favor of the relocation, stated congregants would not have to pay any of the costs for the new church.