Unity Center of Practical Christianity

 church, interesting place

4-story French-Renaissance style religious building completed in 1903 as a stable and carriage house. Designed by York & Sawyer for Helen Miller Gould, the grand brick and limestone stable was based on King Henry IV’s 17th Century Place des Vosges in Paris. The four levels of the structure housed the Gould horses and carriages, hay and feed, as well as apartments for the coachman and groom.

It is clad in red brick and limestone over a rusticated limestone ground floor. Architect Sawyer added a near-whimsical touch in the huge, carved limestone tethering rings on either side of the entrance. The broad, three-centered arch entrance is the most prominent feature of the stable's ground story, informing the ornamental program dependent upon it: the granite base, the elaborate water table, the banded limestone rustication, and elbow voussoirs. Originally solid doors had filled the arch; today the entrance is glass, framed in steel with a simple configuration of thin steel mullions echoing the tripartite bay above. Two very narrow windows, flanking the arched entrance, pierce the rustication. They are screened with ornamental wrought-iron grilles. Three console brackets -- the swagged keystone of the entrance arch and those flanking with pendant guttae -- suppport the 2nd-floor balcony.

A thick, oblong molding separates the limestone ground floor from the limestone and brick of the 2nd & 3rd floors. The base of the 2nd-floor balcony projects from this molding and carries a wrought-iron balustrade. Rising from behind the balcony, a 2-story smooth-faced ashlar limestone bay breaks through the entablature, terminating as an aediculated dormer in the base of the hipped roof. The deeply set, wood sash casement and transom windows on both the 2nd & 3rd floors are contained within this tripartite bay.

The cavetto (a concave molding) of the building's water table is repeated in the spandrels of the 3rd-floor windows. The sides of this bay are keyed into the Flemish bond and mirror the limestone quoins. To accommodate the 4th-floor dormer the entablature is articulated as two separate but identical elements.

The dormer's limestone balconette and its wrought-iron railing are supported by two brackets projecting from the architrave. The dormer's limestone aediculation consists of an eared architrave supported by volutes, a laurel frieze and denticulated pediment. Behind it rises the high hipped roof of slate and lower, flanking mansard. Above the dormer there is an eyebrow-hooded ventilator. The tall flanking chimneys are of brick with limestone quoins and caps. Limestone volutes, precisely articulated, support the base of the chimneys. A copper cap with two finials crowns the hipped roof. The lower mansard roof, also of slate, is visible between the chimneys and the hipped roof.

In 1921 this carriage house and stable was converted to a private garage and the interior was altered to accommodate four automobiles. The 2nd and 3rd floors became an apartment for a chauffeur. The building passed from Gould ownership in 1944, and in 1957 the interior was renovated as a custom shoe show room and two apartments. Since 1982 it has been the home of the Unity Center for Practical Christianity which has owned the building since 1983.

The Unity Center of Practical Christianity in New York City was founded by Georgiana Tree West in 1936. She authored many popular articles and books for Unity expressing the teachings in a clear and practical way. Georgiana was the Minister at The Center until 1959, when she was succeeded by another well-known Unity Minister: popular author and poet, J. Sig Paulson, from 1959 to 1961. One other distinguished Unity Minister who served in New York City was Richard Lynch, who wrote many best-selling books on Unity Metaphysics.

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