50 Oldest Churches of NYC: Church of the Holy Communion (Limelight)

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The Church of the Holy Communion at 656–662 Avenue of the Americas (Sixth Avenue) at West 20th Street in the Flatiron District of Manhattan, New York City, was the first church in New York to have free pews. It was also one of the first to have weekly communion services. Its sisterhood of women church works, begun in 1852, opened new fields of church social ministry for women.

The Gothic Revival church building was constructed in 1844–1845 according to a design by Richard Upjohn, and was consecrated in 1846. In 1853 Upjohn completed the Parish House and Rectory on West 20th Street, and in 1854 he built the Sister’s House. The design of the church, which features brownstone blocks chosen for placement at random angles. Upjohn designed the building to resemble a small medieval English parish church.

In 1975 the declining parish merged with those of Calvary Church, on Park Avenue South at East 21st Street, and St. George’s Church, at Stuyvesant Square, and the combined parish of Calvary-St. George’s the Church of the Holy Communion granted a ninety-nine year lease to the Lindisfarne Association. The church became a cultural center in which there were poetry readings, and concerts, as well as lectures on theatre. The Lindisfarne Association, however, was unable to raise the funds to restore this historical landmark, consequently, Lindisfarne moved to Colorado, and returned the church to the Episcopal parish.

The parish subsequently sold the building to Odyssey House, a drug rehabilitation program, in order to meet its fiscal obligations. Odyssey House, in turn, sold the buildings to nightclub entrepreneur Peter Gatien, who opened the New York Limelight club there in 1983. After frequent problems with the police and charges of rampant drug abuse in the club, it was closed, but reopened in 2003 under the name “Avalon”. It closed permanently in 2007.

On May 7, 2010, the building was reopened as a retail mall called the Limelight Marketplace. Conceived by Jack Menashe, who formerly owned SoHo retail store Lounge, James Mansour of Mansour Design, and Melisca Klisanin, Creative Director, the marketplace was a three-story venue consisting of more than 60 small, high-end shops, selling jewelry, clothing, organic goods and other items.

In the fall of 2014, the church was converted to a David Barton Gym. On December 21, 2016, this location as well as all four other David Barton Gym locations in NYC abruptly closed their door for business. In June 2017, it reopened as Limelight Fitness.

The church is a New York City landmark, designated in 1966, and was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1980. It is located within New York City’s Ladies’ Mile Historic District.

50 Oldest Churches of NYC: Saint George’s Episcopal Church

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St. George’s Episcopal Church is a historic church located at 209 East 16th Street at Rutherford Place, on Stuyvesant Square in Manhattan, New York City. It is considered “one of the first and most significant examples of Early Romanesque Revival church architecture in America”, the church exterior was designed by Charles Otto Blesch and the interior by Leopold Eidlitz. It is one of the two sanctuaries of the Calvary-St. George’s Parish.

The original St. George’s was a chapel built in 1752 by Trinity Church on Chapel Street (now Beekman Street) in Lower Manhattan.

In 1811 the congregation became independent, and in 1846–1856 they built this new church uptown, in fashionable Stuyvesant Square. One New Yorker described the location in his diary in 1848 “a howling wilderness.” The spires on each tower of the church were completed almost a decade after the remainder of the building. These masterful, lacy stone spires were deemed unsafe in 1888 and taken down in 1889.

The church was gutted by fire in 1865, everything in the in the interior was lost. The church was rebuilt within the next two years under the supervision of Leopold Eidlitz.

By 1880, the Episcopal church sat in the middle of a neighborhood filled with immigrants, who were largely Catholic and Jewish. The church decided to to downplay doctrinal matters, abolish pew rentals, and offer secular social services programs aimed at helping the poor, including an industrial school, sewing classes, soup kitchens, health programs, boys’ and girls’ clubs, and other educational and recreational initiatives.

In 1976, the parish merged with two others, Calvary Church, which was founded in 1832 and moved to the Gramercy Park area in 1842, and the Church of the Holy Communion, built on Sixth Avenue in 1844—to form the Calvary-St George’s Parish. Calvary Church is still operating, but the Church of the Holy Communion was deconsecrated and sold to pay down the debts of the new combined parish. It was adapted as the Limelight disco. It then operated as a marketplace and from 2017 as a gym.

Saint George’s was among the first of the new Landmarks Preservations Commissions designations, in 1967. The facade received a well-deserved restoration in 1980.