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

A Staten Island Wedding

I was informed by Mrs. B. about the Museum of New York's photo archives when she sent me the following picture asking if I knew what church it was. I was pretty sure it was St. John's Episcopal in Rosebank. It took a little digging to decide that it absolutely was St. John's. I checked present day images of the church on its own website, looked at the old maps to see if there was a house next to the church in the past (there was; a G.S. Schofield lived there), and finally drove past the church to do one last double check. I was right.

On June 1, 1895, Miss Anne Flemming Cameron, third daughter of Sir Roderick Cameron, married Mr. Belmont Tiffany, grandson of Commodore Matthew C. Perry, at St. John's Episcopal Church in Rosebank, Staten Island. Following the wedding they took carriages to the bride's father's 130-acre country estate in Arrochar, "Clifton Berley".


The Bride's Arrival at St. John's Episcopal Church

A little more digging turned up the following article from the New York Times on May 17, 1895. One of the things I've learned in digging into the history of Staten Island's golden age is that the very wealthy were very well documented.







Above - The Bride's Carriage Returns - Right - The church today












The Bride's Departure


Wedding Reception Photos - presumably this is at "Clifton Berley".

Further research told me that the couple divorced and both outlived their only son, George. Belmont ended up in the papers when he was sued by a widow for failing to live up to his promise to marry her. Mrs. Tiffany became a noted society decorator and decorate the Astor Estate on Bermuda. Later both ended up in the papers again when it seemed their son was arrested for drug addiction and committed to the Bloomingdale Hospital for the Insane.