Lost Small Churches of the North Shore: the Hoyt Avenue Church

 

Immanuel Congregational Church of Staten Island, aka the Hoyt Avenue Church

   The idea for these posts came while doing a little research with the 1936 insurance maps of the North Shore and I saw that this church once existed, only a few blocks from my house. I had never heard of it. Coupled with a few other small churches long lost to history, I hope to make several of these posts over the next week or two.

   According to an article in the Advance, the church started as two separate groups: a house church composed of 14 Swedes that met in a mission house on Westervelt Avenue and an adult Sunday school that met in the old Masonic hall in Port Richmond. In 1917 the two groups merged as the Swedish Immanuel Church of Staten Island. It was affiliated with the Swedish Covenant Church, an evangelical church. Later it was renamed the Immanuel Congregational Church of Staten Island. Finally, to avoid confusing it with other churches named Immanuel, it became known simply as the Hoyt Avenue Church.

   In 1974, just before a series of renovations were to take place, a fire broke out during a wedding rehearsal. The fire spread and all the windows were destroyed and the roof collapsed. The congregation eventually voted to disband. Later, the property was sold and houses were built in the church's place.

Hoyt Avenue Church 60th Anniversary Bulletin

   Here's the church's 60th-anniversary bulletin. Clicking on the link below will let you read the entire contents. It's a great snapshot of mid-fifties church life; the hymns, the exciting dinner of turkey, mashed potatoes, and frozen peas, and the speeches. It's also a nice reminder of a time when packs of wild Scandinavians roamed freely on the North Shore.

Hoyt and Delafield - 2012

Lost Apartments of the North Shore: 210 Victory Boulevard

 

                                                            210 Victory Boulevard, ca. 1940
 

 

   I have only the slightest memories of this building, even though I grew up a few blocks away and probably walked past it hundreds of times before it was torn down in the early 2000s. I suspect the reason it never really registered in my mind is because it was set way back from Victory Boulevard and the property was no longer the nicely-maintained lawns and hedges depicted above, but a mass of uncontrolled trees and bushes. 

   When I was a kid, those set-back buildings had acquired a reputation for housing shady characters. A friend of mine lived in one of them - maybe even this one - and I visited once, and it was fairly creepy. 

   According to Dept. of Building records, in 2000, it was reported that the back of the building had collapsed and the front was in imminent danger of coming down. I've always been fascinated about the circumstances by which a perfectly decent building reaches a state where it's abandoned and left to ruin. Whole families lived there once. Hopes were hoped, dreams dreamed, and lives lived inside those walls. Now, it's not much more than a few photos. As such, I'm going to do a series of short posts about buildings similar to this one that once graced our streets and at some point - poof!- just seemed to vanish into the æther.

2013

1917 map

1996 NYC aerial map

North Shore House of Worship Project

Kingsley Methodist and parsonage

My original impetus for blogging about the North Shore of Staten Island was to complete something I called "the Church Project." Fascinated by the rise and fall of communities, the changing demographics of Staten Island over the last century or two, and the persistence of congregations despite surrounding changes, I planned to investigate and chronicle the history of the churches of the Island's North Shore. Where it occurred, I'd look into how buildings transferred from one denomination to another in the light, most often, of demographic changes. 

Kingsley buildings today

As some of the oldest churches are destroyed (i.e. Brighton Heights Reformed and Trinity Methodist), it is also important to document the churches as tangible things, as works of spiritually-inspired art and architecture. I wanted to get as many pictures of as many buildings as possible, particularly the lost ones.

I made a list of all the main worship buildings, past and present, I could think of or document. I put stickers on a map to get some sort of impression of where old ethnic or religious communities were located. I even reached out to one Episcopal church for information (they never got back to me). It was clear it was going to be a difficult undertaking, so when other elements of Staten Island history caught my eye I let the Church Project drop.

St. John's Lutheran

Now, I've been doing this site for about a decade. It's had it good and bad times, but my time at the CSI SI Archives for the last three years has been exactly what I needed to keep me revved up and excited about this site. So excited it turns out, I'm going to attempt to carry out the Church Project.

I'm going to start small. I'll start with one denomination at a time and see how it goes. I'm debating whether to do the Dutch Reformed Church or the Methodist Church first. The former is smaller, with fewer congregations, and its main archives are only in New Brunswick. It's also the church my dad grew up in.

The Methodist Church was bigger on Staten Island, at least through the sixties, and more intriguing. Something happened about fifty years ago and numerous congregations closed and merged with others. From seven churches it shrank to the three that exist today: Faith United, Christ United, and Summerfield, all concentrated in the NW corner of the Island. I'd love to learn what precipitated such a drastic change. The Methodist investigation, though, might be much tougher, so I'm still deciding.

St. John's today

I'm writing about this because I want your help. If you have any information about the archives or histories of any North Shore churches or synagogues, please let me know. I'm especially interested in buildings that have been permanently closed or destroyed. I want pictures, any pictures, but I also want documents discussing the conversations the congregants were having as believers and as members of an organization. I want to know what they were doing for mutual self-help and for their communities. Did community extend beyond fellow worshippers or out into the streets and homes beyond? At this early stage, any help will be greatly appreciated. At the very least, it will help me start focusing on exactly how I want this project to proceed.

For my purposes, the North Shore includes everything north of Victory Blvd. and the Expressway. I'm including the churches along Richmond Avenue opposite Willowbrook Park because several of them figure directly into the history of others further north. 

Lutheran Churches

Trinity - St. Paul's Ave. and Beach Street

Our Savior - Bard and Forest Avenues (originally Nicholas Ave.)

St. Paul/St. Luke  - Decker and Catherine (originally Wasa Lutheran)

St. Paul  - Cary Avenue - defunct, merged with Wasa

Zion - Watchogue Rd - originally Park Ave and before that Avenue B
Immanuel - Richmond Avenue
German Church - York Avenue - split from Trinity and closed ca. 1930

St. John's - Jewett and Post - LCMS

Bethany - Westcott - Lutheran Brethren

St. Olaf's - defunct, bottom of Hendricks - I don't know if this was actually Lutheran, but as it was Norwegian it's possible.

Methodist Churches

Faith United - Heberton and Castleton Avenues

Christ United - Forest Avenue in Graniteville

Summerfield - Harbor Road

Asbury - Richmond Road - defunct, presently SonRise Faith Church

Willowbrook Road (I don't even know the name of this church, or now that I think about it, that it was even Methodist. Maybe it's something I read once) - defunct, presently occupied by Iglesia Pentecostal Rehoboth

Kingsley - foot of Cebra Avenue, defunct

Trinity - defunct, Delafield and Elizabeth - burned down recently
Italian Mission - disbanded, Harbor Road

Richmond Terrace and Heberton Avenue - March, 1927

One of the things I can never quite wrap my head around as I do my excavation of the history of Staten Island's North Shore is the amount of destruction that's taken place over the years. Now, I that word as a negative term, simply a descriptive one. Whole blocks of buildings have come and gone over the past centuries. Some commercial buildings have been demolished and replaced with apartments. Others have been torn down and the lots remain vacant decades later.

It's a little discombobulating to realize streets I have grown up on and lived on for nearly fifty years were drastically different once. Nothing in a city stays the same for long. Populations change and grow. Technologies advance and require different infrastructures. I used to get upset about the physical changes on the Island, but now I've come to understand they've always happened and will continue to forever.

So...Richmond Terrace and Heberton Avenue, 1927. First, looking toward (Port) Richmond Avenue. The changes here are the most extreme. I'm not sure any of the buildings in the old photo are still standing. Nothing of the buildings on the right (the waterside) remains at all.

Richmond Terrace and Heberton Avenue - looking west

The next picture is the same intersection (natch), facing toward Jewett Avenue. Here, the changes are as severe and you can even spot some of the same buildings today as in the 1927 shot.  The building that housed the Willy's-Knight Overland dealership on the right is still there being used for an auto repair shop. Several other buildings on both sides of the Terrace can be seen as well.

Richmond Terrace and Heberton Avenue - looking east

Fox Hills' Magnificent Past

   Fox Hills, a portion of Clifton, was once a prosperous place of large homes, a golf course and open fields.  In 1860, according to the NY Times, a great convocation of Republicans gathered at Clifton Park's Pagoda to hear speeches by George Curtis and Horace Greeley in support of ratifying the presidential nomination, Abraham Lincoln.  I'm not exactly sure where the Pagoda was but my research leads me to believe it's described as being at "the head of Simonson Avenue" which means at either Bay Street and Greenfield Avenue or where Osgood and Greenfield would theoretically intersect.

   Today  it's seen mostly as an appendix to the neighborhood of Park Hill and suffers from the same poor reputation.  Driving through, it should be clear that even after residential development did away with its open spaces it was still a comfortable middle-class place of comfortable and attractive homes.

The estate of Mr. J. D. Dix over the ages

   The house slowly lost its open surroundings and looks to have been demolished sometime between 1951 and 1971.  That's the date, and I offer no guarantee  as to its accuracy (the C of O is dated March, 1975), given by NYC's online records for the thirty-unit apartment building built where it once stood.  The one reference I found to Mr. Dix was about his house being used in the 1850's as the meeting place of the founders of the late First Presbyterian Church.  

   Fox Hills was originally the name of one Lewis Henry Meyer's estate.  Later a golf course sat where the bulk of the Fox Hills and Park Hills apartment complexes now loom.  The course was originally laid out by the Staten Island Cricket Club in 1899.  When the club went bankrupt about a year later the Fox Hills Golf Club was founded by men described by the NY Times as "enthusiasts" in order to save the links for golfing.  Unfortunately the plan only lasted until 1935 when the Depression killed the club closed.
   According to NYC Park's page on the playground at Sobel Court, an army hospital was built along Vanderbilt Avenue in 1918 that operated until 1922.  It was reopened as a hospital and POW camp during WW II and after the war converted to veterans housing.  In the fifties the military closed the site for good.
 

The Fox Hills Base from somewhere around Van Duzer or Targee Street I'd guess.

   Today the only clear reminder of the area's golfing past is Fairway Avenue.  The club house stood about where Osgood and Fairway Avenues meet.  About where it stood is now occupied by the Ukrainian Church and houses.

    left - Fox Hills Golf Course Club House     right - Fairway and Osgood Avenues (from Google)

   So there's an initial taste of the wonders of old Fox Hills.  So far I haven't been able to find any of the houses in the foreground of the base picture but I'm sure some are still extant.  Maybe by the time I do my next post on the area I'll have found them.  Here's hoping!

This is the end.... The Smith Infirmary's Days Are Numbered

As promised, here's some fresh off the digital camera shots of the gradually collapsing Smith Infirmary of the original Staten Island Hospital.

   Taken from Cebra and Rosewood

   This is the perspective I saw the Smith Infirmary from at least once a day for over thirty years of my life.  Closed for over thirty years, I can still picture it as an operating facility with doctors, nurses, aides and all sorts of maintenance workers.   The shops at the intersection of Victory and Cebra flourished because of the hospital.  There were Kohlmann's Florist, Matty's Barbershop, Precious Treasures Gifts, a jeweler's, a liquor store and several bars.  

   Over time those places went away and were replaced by decreasingly good delis, junk stores and Albanian pizzerias.  At least these days there's Dosa Garden (which I'm not sure I could actually recommend enough).

The Hole  - below, unseen, a great pile of 

fallen bricks cover the ground

  Brooding over it all is the crumbling hulk of the old hospital.  For years there were plans to renovate it and turn it into some sort of condo complex.  When I, in an early incarnation, worked for the city, I tried to uncover the insane web of ownership of the place for a potential investor.  

   In the end, after looking at deeds, plans, transaction records and talking to the Commissioner for Finance it all came to nothing.  One man claimed to own it but, even in order to save himself millions of dollars in delinquent taxes, couldn't.  

   Ultimately the investor decided it was not worth dipping into the deep pool of garbage that was the old Staten Island Hospital site.  I guessed the place would just deteriorate until it got so bad that the city's office of Housing Preservation and Development (HPD) would simply take possession of the complex and bulldoze it.

   The was thirteen years ago and the place was still salvageable but nothing happened.  Since then, even when the city had money, no North Shore or borough politician stepped forward to invest money to at least stabilize the place.  Then the roofs of the back buildings (where I worked on my dentistry merit badge) collapsed and HPD had to demolish them.

   And it got worse and worse.  There was fake landlord who rented out units in the converted new building.  Then there were squatters.  Eventually HPD did a better job of sealing the newer buildings up for good but the infirmary and other remaining old building (I think a nursing school) just crumbled.

  And now I'm proven correct.  HPD owns it and according to the Advance, they're going to raze it.

   For many of the past thirty-two years this (the hospital's new building that was converted to housing, though it was allegedly a real estate scam) has looked pretty much like this.  Through five City Council Members (the only one I consider blameless is Debi Rose because by the time she got elected the damage was done), three Borough Presidents, four mayors, three State Assembly members, two Staten Senators, and six members of the House of Representatives.  Many of them were North Shore born and raised.  

It's a little late.