High Church - North Shore Episcopalian Churches Pt. 5

St. Simon's movable church

   When I started posting about the North Shore's Episcopal churches last year, I didn't know that St. Simon's was about to close. Again, like St. John's, it wasn't a church anyone I knew attended. It was just a small, brick church I saw along a curve on Richmond Road. Despite its thoroughly modern architecture, it still had the red doors many traditionally-designed Episcopal churches have. Now, it's gone, and its presence stripped clean from the internet. 

St. Simon's brick building on Clove Road, ca. 1940

   From the Staten Island Advance, the amazing New York Chapters of the American Guild of Organists site, and St. John's Episcopal's site, I discovered, like many other churches on the Island, St. Simon's was founded as a mission congregation to immigrants. Under the direction of the Rev. Richard M. Abercrombie, the St. Simon’s Free German Chapel of the Protestant Episcopal Church was founded in 1854. It first operated from a small building on Targee Street before moving to the vacant First Baptist building. That wood frame church was moved to Rhine Avenue near Steuben, and later to Clove Road. In 1960, the construction of the Staten Island Expressway forced the relocation of the parish to Richmond Road. The new church was built and for almost sixty years served its member. The building remains, but the parish is gone, its surviving member presumably shuffled off to other congregations. Any shuttered congregation is a loss of community and a connection to history and place, but I bet, as is so often the case, the building will soon house another denomination and starting their own history in a place that's new to them.

St. Simon's Richmond Road building - 2018

   Stapleton, in the middle of the nineteenth century, was filled with Germans. On their own, the wealthy beer barons among them founded Trinity Lutheran on the corner of Beach and St. Paul's. Catholic Germans co-founded Immaculate Conception Roman Catholic Church on Targee Street, as well. As a member of Trinity, I always knew some of that history, and as I began studying Stapleton's past, I picked up some bits about Immaculate. St. Simon's past, though, is all new to me. I wonder how long the German influence there lasted. 

from the SI Advance - St. Simon's on Clove Road prior to demolition

   Trinity, which had called Pastor Frederic Sutter to inaugurate a more English-language direction for the church, still held German services into the early eighties. Finding the answer to this sort of question is a large part of the reason I started the Church Project so many years ago. Staten Island, no less than anywhere else in NYC, has a history of changing populations that reuse and repurpose the landmarks of the preceding residents. I guess this means I have to find and reach out to an archivist at the Episcopal Diocese of New York. 

From the NYC of the American Guild of Organists 

interior of St. Simon's

More Lutherans

St. Paul's - St. Luke's Lutheran Church (formerly Wasa Lutheran) - 186 Decker Ave - Port Richmond


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Originally founded as Vasa Lutheran by Swedes in 1908, this was the church of my mother's family. One of her sisters is still very active in the congregation.
In 1971, the renamed St. Luke's Church merged with the dwindling St. Paul's Church (originally a German congregation) from over on Cary Avenue in West New Brighton creating the new and improved St. Paul's - St. Luke's Lutheran Church.

The old, sold, and condemned St. Paul's Lutheran Church - Cary Ave. and Caroline St. - West New Brighton

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Our Savior Lutheran Church - 557 Bard Avenue - West New Brighton


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My mother always told me how Our Savior existed only as a basement through the early sixties. It had relocated from that old Scandinavian stronghold, Port Richmond, to Forest and Bard Avenues and could only afford to excavate the present basement of the church and throw a flat roof over that. Eventually the congregation raised enough money and built the present modern and, inside at least, surprisingly beautiful sanctuary and chapel. Not surprisingly, the Norwegian heritage of the congregation is reflected in the clean Scandinavian modern wood work throughout the church.
The church parsonage (not pictured) is one of the several remaining stone houses in the area built by the opthamologist Samuel MacKenzie Elliot in the mid 19th century.




The original Our Savior Lutheran was located on Nicholas and Hatfield Avenues. Now it's a Moose Lodge.

The Church Project Lite

So I'm too lazy/too overwhelmed/too tired, or just too something indefinable to carry out the Church Project the way I originally intended to. So...
So, what I'll do is just get googlemap shots and the occasional old timey picture of the North Shore churches and some information about them.
I'll do it by denomination, starting with my home court, the Lutheran churches.

DAY ONE

Trinity Evangelical Lutheran - 309 Saint Pauls Ave - Stapleton


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My old church and elementary school. Founded by Germans back in the nineteenth century, Trinity really took off in the early twentieth century under the stewardship of Pastor Fredrick Sutter. In the google picture you can see the damage to the steeple caused by the tornado that ravaged the North Shore 2 years ago.


Zion Lutheran - 505 Watchogue Road, Westerleigh


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The group that founded Zion Lutheran started as an adult Norwegian Sunday school class in a no longer standing building in Port Richmond. At some point they collected enough money and built a beautiful neo-Gothic church on Bennett Street alongside Port Richmond Park. In the sixties they relocated to Westerleigh and built the kind of ugly modern church they still occupy on Watchogue and Willowbrook Roads.










I started with Trinity and Zion because they represent the two most active and vibrant Lutheran congregations remaining on Staten Island. They also still have a strong sense of their initial ethnic origins. Trinity was still holding German services in the early eighties.

They also represent two distinct wings of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America. Trinity came from money (particularly the Stapleton beer barons of the nineteenth century) and Zion from working class poverty. Today Trinity maintains a much more ritual filled worship service and Zion's is more stripped down.

The great wave of Lutheranism that once represented Germans, Norwegians and Swedes in numerous churches has receded with the demographic changes across the Island as well as the general collapse of the mainline denominations.