Riverside Church, New York City

Riverside Church is a Christian church in Morningside Heights, Manhattan, New York City. It is located on the block bounded by Riverside Drive, Claremont Avenue, and 120th and 122nd Streets, near Columbia University's Morningside Heights campus and across from Grant's Tomb. Although interdenominational, it is also associated with the American Baptist Churches USA and the United Church of Christ. The church was conceived by philanthropist businessman John D. Rockefeller Jr., in conjunction with minister Harry Emerson Fosdick, as a large, interdenominational church in Morningside Heights, a neighborhood surrounded by several academic institutions.


The original building, opened in 1930, was designed by Henry C. Pelton and Allen & Collens in the Neo-Gothic style. It contains a nave consisting of five architectural bays; a chancel at the front of the nave; a 22-story, 392-foot-tall (119 m) tower above the nave; a narthex and chapel; and a cloistered passageway that connects to the eastern entrance on Claremont Avenue. The main feature of the church is the 72-bell carillon near the top of the tower, dedicated to John Rockefeller Jr's mother Laura Spelman Rockefeller. A seven-story wing to the south of the original building was built in 1959 to a design by Collens, Willis & Beckonert, and renamed for Martin Luther King Jr. in 1985. The Stone Gym, to the southeast, was built in 1915 as a dormitory designed by Louis E. Jallade, and was converted to a gym in 1962.


A focal point of global and national activism since its inception, Riverside Church has a long history of social justice, in adherence to Fosdick's original vision of a "interdenominational, interracial, and international" church. Riverside Church's congregation includes more than forty ethnic groups. It was designated as a city landmark by the New York City Landmarks Preservation Commission in 2000, and was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 2012.

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