Holy Trinity Lutheran Church (New York City, New York) | Neo-Gothic (architecture), movie / film / TV location, 1903_construction

 church, Neo-Gothic (architecture), movie / film / TV location, 1903_construction

Neo-Gothic, Evangelical Lutheran Church completed in 1903. Designed by Schickel & Ditmars, it is clad in limestone and granite.

The Evangelical Lutheran Church of the Holy Trinity was founded on January 27th, 1868. For the first 30 years of its existence, the church occupied a plot of land in what is today the Flatiron section of Manhattan in a building that was originally built for St. Paul’s Dutch Reformed Church of New York City. In 1902 church purchased a lot at the corner of Central Park West and 65th Street, which remains the church’s home to this day. At that time, sheep still grazed on the aptly named Sheep Meadow, and the Upper West Side was a rapidly developing yet still relatively remote part of the city.

The church is a double-height-over-basement stone structure with a rectory. The facades are heavily rusticated and rough-faced. The front facade facing Central Park West has a wide set of steps leading up to two matching entrances in pointed-aches. Both have bright red wooden double-doors flanked by engaged Corinthian columns set at recessed angles. The tops of the arches are filled by hexafoil windows with iron tracery, and two little trefoils at the lower edges. Above a narrow cornice there is an arcade of very slender colonettes in front of a blind panel, supporting seven small pointed-arches, with small trefoils above each colonette. This is surmounted by the great stained-glass rose window with stone tracery in the form of six cinquefoils arrange around a central quatrefoil, with smaller quatrefoils at the lower corners and the apex of the pointed-arch containing the rose window. A pair of narrow, angled, projecting towers frame the center section of the facade, topped by a pair of narrow bell towers lined with columns and crowned by steep-sloped slate cones. Between these the center section rises to a point with a trio of small windows and a crowning stone cross. There are shorter end bays on either side of the center section, both with a tall, narrow, pointed-arch window opening. Buttresses mark the edges of the facade, topped by steep slate pyramids rising up to about the level of the rose window.

The long south facade on 65th Street is six bays wide. It has a doorway at the east end, with bright red wooden double-doors under a pointed segmental-arch, and a similar entrance at the west end but with a wider single door instead of double-doors. Projecting piers separate each bay, and the four middle bays have paired basement windows behind a dry moat enclosed by a wrought-iron fence. Above, the five eastern bays have large pointed-arch openings with tripartite stained-glass windows and stone tracery. The narrower west end bay has a taller but narrower arch with a double-window. A dentiled string course and metal gutter caps this level, with the top level of the facade set back above it. Here each bay has a trio of pointed-arch windows, and there is another dentiled stone band with a metal gutter, surmounted by a pitched slate roof. The west end bay does not set back and instead has a pair of round-arched windows with a round opening for a trefoil window above them, where it rises to a peaked gable topped by a small stone cross. At the 3rd bay from the west, the peak of the pitched roof is crowned by a green-patinaed copper-clad fleche (a Gothic spire) with gargoyles stretching from its base.

After a process spanning four decades, the final of the eight stained glass windows was installed on June 1, 1941. In the 1984 film Ghostbusters, the rampaging Stay Puft Marshmallow Man steps on and destroys the church, causing Peter Venkman to exclaim, "Nobody steps on a church in my town!"