Old South Church
| Old South Church in Boston | |||
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| National Register of Historic Places | |||
| National Historic Landmark | |||
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| location | Boston , Massachusetts | ||
| Coordinates | 42 ° 21 '0.7 " N , 71 ° 4' 40.8" W | ||
| Built | 1874 | ||
| architect |
Charles Amos Cummings , Willard T. Sears |
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| Architectural style | Gothic revival | ||
| NRHP number | [1] 70000690 | ||
| Data | |||
| The NRHP added | December 30, 1970 | ||
| Declared as an NHL | December 30, 1970 | ||
The Old South Church (formally correct Old South Church in Boston , coll. Also New Old South ) is a church building of the United Church of Christ erected in 1874 in the city of Boston in the state of Massachusetts of the United States . It was designed in the style of the Gothic Revival by the architects Charles Amos Cummings and Willard T. Sears and built on land reclaimed in the Back Bay district . The building is located at 645 Boylston Street on Copley Square and was listed on December 30, 1970 as a National Historic Landmark on the National Register of Historic Places .
history
The building is a prayer house of the United Church of Christ , which is historically linked to congregationalism . The church is home to one of the oldest religious communities in the United States, founded in 1669 by dissidents from the First Church in Boston as the Third Church in Boston . The community met in their cedar prayer house from 1670 and in the Old South Meeting House from 1729 . Members of the ward included personalities such as Samuel Adams , William Dawes , Benjamin Franklin , Samuel Sewall, and Phillis Wheatley . In 1773, Samuel Adams from the tower of the Old South Meeting House gave the signals that the Boston Tea Party would begin .
During the heyday of Unitarianism in the early 19th century, the Old South was the only congregational church in Boston to be bound by the doctrine of the Trinity . In 1816, the church and Park Street Church founded the City Mission Society , a social institution that cared for the poor in Boston. During the Civil War , the building served as a recruitment center for the Union Army under Pastor Jacob Manning . Although the community was not completely abolitionist , it supported the cause of the Union Army intensely. After the end of the war, the congregation grew steadily and in 1875, under Rev. George Angier Gordon, moved from its headquarters on Washington Street to its current location in the Back Bay district.
architecture
The church building was designed between 1870 and 1872 by the Boston architecture firm Cummings and Sears in the Venetian Gothic style, which follows the guidelines of the British cultural theorist and architecture critic John Ruskin . The Old South Church is one of the most significant examples of the Ruskin influence on American architecture . The architects Charles Amos Cummings and Willard T. Sears also designed the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum building . The outer structure of the church consists largely of a locally occurring rock conglomerate called Roxbury Puddingstone . Beige and dark red sandstone has been worked into many of the arches and stone walls . The portico and the large open arches in the campanile are decorated with simple tracery . The upper arches of the portico also show wrought iron decorations . The roof consists of alternating rows of red and dark gray slate and is finished with ornaments made of iron .
Campanile
The steeple or campanile towering at the western end of the building is the main feature of the church and is visible from several parts of the city. It stands 246 ft (74.98 m ) tall and houses the 2020 pound (99.8 kg ) bell . It is already the second tower that was built at this point. The first was completed in 1875, but has been sloping more and more since the late 1920s. The reason for this was faulty foundations and pillars that were anchored in the soft, swampy subsoil and could not support the tower. The tower was demolished, and advances in technology in the early 1930s brought the tools necessary for long-term stability with backhoes and steel scaffolding. Today, the incline and height of the tower are measured regularly and tested for continued stability. In 2006, the flywheel, which is driven by a heavy rope and pushes the hammer against the bell, was replaced by a true-to-original replica.
Rose window
Centered above the chancel on the east side of the church is a copper- clad dome , which is surrounded by twelve ornate, Gothic arched windows. This is a reminiscence of the Basilica di San Marco in Venice . Although the rose window exudes an extremely high visual presence, it was built with a certain function: In the age before electrically operated fans and air conditioning systems, the windows could be opened mechanically to cool the inside of the building.
Ornaments
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The interior of the church is lavishly furnished and includes a mixture of the most varied of materials: Italian cherry wood decorated with carvings , limestone , structured plaster and stained glass . One enters the building through the narthex over a wall carved in the Venetian Gothic style from French Pierre de Caen . Behind the carved foliage that decorates the wall are a squirrel , a lizard , an owl and a snail . The same animals are also found in the decorations on the outside walls of the building. The interior of the chancel at the east end of the church behind the Choir is lined with wooden arcs whose quatrefoil - steadies of the upper arcade of Ducal Palace in Venice are derived. The stained-glass windows were made by the British glass manufacturer Clayton and Bell in the style of English glass from the 15th century.
Interior decoration 1875
When it was consecrated in 1875, the church looked largely as it can be seen today. The walls were decorated with multi-colored, three-dimensional motifs, with madder in particular for the background and ocher , laurel green , gray and khaki for overlays and gold for individual highlights. Most of the interior - with the exception of the carved frieze along the balconies - was in place as early as 1875.
The dome is located high above the nave . Your ceiling was painted a deep Berlin blue and has a pattern of golden stars that represent the firmament of God as a night sky . In the interplay with the tracery made of limestone on the western wall of the chancel with the foliage and the animals, the representation of God's creation results.
Above the doors on the east wall of the chancel are glass mosaics of the Tree of Life by Antonio Salviati . A third mosaic by Salviati originally hung in the tympanum above the front doors of the tower, but was moved into the vestibule as part of the new construction of the tower .
The combined effect was extremely impressive; the experience was spiritual and sensual at the same time and represented a significant difference to the simple furnishings of the Old South Meeting House . Stylistically, the interior harmonized well with the exterior of the church and thus realized Ruskin's ideal: "in art that the heart, the head, and the hand of a man come together ".
Interior decoration 1905
In 1905 the community hired the painter and glass artist Louis Comfort Tiffany to redecorate the chancel. Tiffany headed a group of artisans called Associated Artists , whose work was largely in keeping with the style now known as Aestheticism . Tiffany had designed Mark Twain's home in Hartford , the Red Room in the White House, and various houses in the Back Bay area , drawing on many of John Ruskin’s ideas.
By the time Tiffany began work on the Old South Church, however, there had already been a change in trend towards the Beaux-Arts style, with the Colonial Revival style replacing Victorian ornamentation with simpler classicism . During a renovation of the White House in 1902 , Theodore Roosevelt had any reference to Tiffany completely removed.
As part of the redesign of the church, Tiffany covered the glass windows with inlets made of clear, purple-colored glass. The originally multi-colored plaster walls were also painted purple and covered with geometric patterns, which were worked out with silver accent colors.
1950s minimalism
In the early 1950s, a second restoration of the sanctuary was carried out - probably influenced by the minimalism of the International Style - but largely ignored the architectural history of the church. The paintings and sculptures by Tiffany were covered with a layer of light gray paint and the colored glass was removed again, the opaion of the dome was closed. In a way, by removing the decorations, the puritan roots of the community became visible again.
restoration
The Old South Church was inscribed on the National Register of Historic Places as a National Historic Landmark in 1970 . A restoration of the building began in 1984 based on current research. For this purpose, the appearance of the church at the time of its construction was reconstructed as best as possible using old photographs and prints. Color analyzes were also carried out in order to be able to replicate the original colors. The entire interior of the church was adjusted to its appearance around 1875, the dome was reopened and the multi-colored decorations were reconstructed.
organ
The organ, Opus 308 , now used in the church , was originally built in 1921 by Ernest Martin Skinner for the St. Paul, Minnesota Ordway Civic Theater and moved to the church in 1985 when the theater was demolished. The instrument has 183 ranks and 7,625 pipes from 0.25 in (6.35 mm ) to 32 ft (9.75 m ) in length.
The organ's keyboard is located behind the pulpit on a hydraulic platform that can be extended during concerts and retracted during church services.
In 2008 the building was damaged by construction work by the MBTA on the Green Line station in Copley Square . For fear of further damage, the organ was therefore not used again until Easter 2009.
Leading pastors
To date, 20 people have worked as leading pastors in the community:
- Thomas Thacher 1670–1678
- Samuel Willard 1678-1707
- Ebenezer Pemberton 1700-1717
- Joseph Sewall 1713-1769
- Thomas Prince 1718-1758
- Alexander Cumming 1761-1763
- Samuel Blair 1766–1769
- John Hunt / John Bacon 1771-1775
- Joseph Eckley 1779-1811
- Joshua Huntington 1808-1819
- Benjamin B. Wisner 1821-1832
- Samuel H. Stearns 1834-1836
- George W. Blagden 1836–1872
- Jacob M. Manning 1857-1882
- George Angier Gordon 1884–1927
- Russell Henry Stafford 1927-1945
- Frederick M. Meek 1946-1973
- James W. Crawford 1974-2002
- Carl F. Schultz, Jr. 2002–2005 (interim)
- Nancy S. Taylor 2005–
See also
- List of entries on the National Register of Historic Places in northern Boston
- List of National Historic Landmarks in Boston
Individual evidence
- ^ National Register Information System . In: National Register of Historic Places . National Park Service . Retrieved January 23, 2007.
- ^ A b Listing of National Historic Landmarks by State: Massachusetts. National Park Service , accessed August 11, 2019.
literature
- Aldrich, Megan. Gothic revival. Phaidon Press Ltd: 1994. ISBN 0-7148-2886-6 .
- Bunting, Bainbridge. Houses of Boston's Back Bay: An Architectural History, 1840-1917. Belknap Press of Harvard University Press: 1967. ISBN 0-674-40901-9 .
- Hitchcock, Henry-Russell . Architecture: Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries. Yale University Press, Penguin History of Art, 2nd edition 1963. ISBN 0-14-056115-3 .
- Hill, George Andrews, and George Frederick Bigelow. History of the Old South Church (Third Church) Boston, 1669-1884. Houghton, Mifflin and Company, The Riverside Press: 1890.
- O'Gorman, James F. On the Boards: Drawings by Nineteenth-Century Boston Architects. University of Pennsylvania Press: 1989. ISBN 978-0-8122-1287-7 .
- Adolf K. Placzek (Ed.): Macmillan Encyclopedia of Architects. Free Press: 1982. ISBN 0-02-925000-5 .
- Shand-Tucci, Douglas. Built in Boston: City and Suburb, 1800-2000. The University of Massachusetts Press: 1999. ISBN 1-55849-201-1 .
- Waters, Henry Fritz-Gilbert. Genealogical gleanings in England . The New England Historical and Genealogical Register. Vol. 37-52, 1883-1898.
- Withey, Henry F. Biographical Dictionary of American Architects (Deceased). Hennessey & Ingalls: 1970.
- History of the Old South Church of Boston. Published for the benefit of the Old South Fund: 1890.
