The Church of the Holy Apostles is located at 296 Ninth Avenue at 28th Street in the Chelsea neighborhood of Manhattan, New York. Its historic church building was built from 1845 to 1848, and was designed by New York architect Minard Lafever. The geometric stained-glass windows were designed by William Jay Bolton.
The Holy Apostles congregation was founded in 1844 as the result of an outreach by Trinity Church to immigrants who worked on the Hudson River waterfront west of the Church’s location in the Chelsea section of Manhattan.
Lafever enlarged the building by 25 feet by adding a chancel in 1853–54. In 1858 the congregation needed to expand, so architect Charles Babcock of the firm of Richard Upjohn & Son enlarged the building into a cross-shaped sanctuary with the addition of transepts.
The church, is the only one that Lafever designed which remains standing in Manhattan. It is also one of the very few of Italianate design on the island.
It is rumored that the church was a stop on the Underground Railroad during the American Civil War.
In the 1970s, the church was instrumental in the foundation of Congregation Beit Simchat Torah, a synagogue for gays and lesbians begun by Jacob Gubbay. It hosted the congregation from 1973 to 1975, and again from December 1998 until it found a permanent home in April 2016.
In that same decade, Holy Apostles hosted the ordination of the first woman priest (and openly lesbian) in the New York diocese, Rev. Ellen Barrett.
In 1959, builders of Penn South, a housing cooperative that surrounded the church, considered demolishing the church to make way for development. Ultimately, four churches on the site, including the Church of the Holy Apostles, were saved. The sanctuary was badly damaged in 1990 by a fire, in which some of the stained-glass windows were lost. A restoration began almost immediately, and was completed in 1994 under the supervision of Ed Kamper, without interruption of the social services the church provides.
The Church of the Holy Apostles was designated a New York City landmark in 1966, and was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1972.