Church of St. Luke Shows A Parish Hall Design

By Joy Pape

This artist’s view of the proposed Parish Hall is looking southwest from the Hudson and Christopher street intersection. The Archive Building dominates the background. Credit: BKSK.

On July 21, the Community Board 2 (CB2) Landmark Committee held a public hearing open to all. I joined nearly 100 other interested people to see the presentation of the designs for a new Parish Mission Hall of the Church of St. Luke in the Fields.

Reverend Caroline Stacey, rector for the past 20 years, made introductory remarks emphasizing the long history of St. Luke, built here by Trinity Church in 1821, when the little chapel was surrounded by fields.

As early as 1836, city maps show that the church block had rowhouses built by the church surrounding the chapel around the entire block, remaining until at least 1940, as shown in historic photos. Sometime before 1969, when this area was included in the Historic District designation report, all but the 10 current rowhouses had been lost, and a school building had been built along Greenwich Street. That left the other three corners of the block open for other uses: a SW corner parking lot, a SE corner garden, and a NE corner fenced school playground. On March 6, 1981, the Parish Hall was destroyed by fire but not rebuilt, while the damaged chapel was rebuilt.

For the 20 years Mother Stacey has been rector of the church, and for some outreach programs even longer, the little church has provided many services to help the surrounding community. With the building of a new Parish Hall, St. Luke intends to continue those programs as before, but to answer many worried inquiries, Mother Stacey strongly assured the attendees that there would be no homeless shelter, overnight shelter, transitional housing, drug injection center, no Narcan distribution, and no soup kitchen.

Mother Stacey then introduced the design team from BKSK Architects, who showed their design concept for the new hall, including new floor plans and exterior views in realistic renderings. The single-story hall will be about 6,000 square feet of interior space, going almost as far back as the rowhouse back yard depth. The corner of Hudson and Christopher streets is a busy, heavily trafficked area for both cars, buses and pedestrians. The church’s master plan for the campus was reportedly approved by the Landmarks Preservation Commission in 2013, and the church has a right to build on their property. There are now four schools within a block of this location. The design team assured the attendees that they had explored every other possible location, and even digging basements, but none fit the size or budget limits.

Since the purpose of this hearing was to consider the historic preservation aspects of the design, the architects showed images of the church’s buildings, other one-story neighborhood buildings (all commercial), and one-story pavilions for city parks. There were images of the new materials selected for the façades, mostly reused red brick and dark green terra cotta vertical panels.

Despite their best attempts to explain why their design responded to historic precedent, the committee and attendees were not convinced that this would be an appropriate building for this site. Of the 20 or so who signed up to speak from the public, about half were for and half against this proposal. The dark colors and lack of windows, plus a lack of anything that would remind anyone of the historic context of the church, led the committee to recommend denial of this design, with the suggestion that the design team return with a better design.

Village View will continue to report on the progress.