Calvary Church is an Episcopal church located at 277 Park Avenue South on the corner of East 21st Street in the Gramercy Park neighborhood of Manhattan, New York City, on the border of the Flatiron District. It was designed by James Renwick Jr., the architect who designed in a gothic revival style in 1848. Renwick also designed St. Patrick’s Cathedral and Grace Church in NYC. Calvary is constructed of brownstone.
The Calvary Church parish was founded in 1832, and initially used a wooden-frame church on what was then Fourth Avenue – which has since become Park Avenue – uptown of its current site. In 1867 there were two large wooden towers that rose from the front facade but today only the octagonal bases remain. The church’s two wooden spires were removed in September 1860 when they became unstable.
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The church complex also includes the nine-story Calvary House, east of the church on Gramercy Park North (East 21st Street), also designed by Renwick, and built in 1867. Calvary House is now rented out as offices.
The “Renwick Gem” Schoolhouse, is a small building to the north of the church which was built as a theatre but used for that purpose only for a short time before being utilized for the Calvary Church Sunday school. It has a large interior space, about 27 feet (8.2 m) between the columns, which were designed to hold up the heavy slate roof without the use of exterior buttresses.
The family of Theodore Roosevelt lived two blocks away from Calvary Church from 1854 to 1872 and Calvary was the church the family belonged to. Other congregants included members of the Astor and Vanderbilt families. some of the richest families of the gilded age.
In 1976, facing financial difficulty, Calvary parish merged with the nearby parishes of St. George’s Church and the Church of the Holy Communion. The Holy Communion buildings were de-consecrated and sold to pay down the debts of the new combined parish, eventually becoming the Limelight disco, and the remaining two churches were able to remain afloat. During the early days of New York’s 2020 COVID-19 lockdown, New York Post reported on the church’s bells, which played “Amazing Grace” and other hymns four times a day.