Holy Trinity Church (Protestant Episcopal)

About this property

St. Ann & the Holy Trinity Church is a historic Episcopal church at the northwest corner of Montague and Clinton Streets in the Brooklyn Heights neighborhood of Brooklyn in New York City. It is the co-cathedral of the Episcopal Diocese of Long Island. The building was built as Church of the Holy Trinity, and opened in 1847. Following years of controversy, the parish was closed in 1957. The building stood mostly empty for the next 12 years. The present name of the parish reflects the fact that the congregation of St. Ann's, the oldest Episcopal parish in Brooklyn, moved into the empty Holy Trinity building in 1969. The church has some of the earliest figural stained-glass windows made in the United States, crafted by William Jay Bolton. The church was declared a National Historic Landmark in 1987. The designer for Holy Trinity was prominent 19th-century American architect Minard Lafever, with stained glass by William Jay Bolton and John Bolton. In 1859 English architect Gervase Wheeler was hired to enlarge and make improvements in the chancel, such as modifications to the reading desk and adding pews; Wheeler was directed to follow the original plan in his work. A rectory was constructed immediately west of the church between 1895 and 1897. The ground floor of this building now serves as the parish hall. Following the departure of the St. Ann Center for Restoration and the Arts in 1999, the church complex continued to lease school, office, programming, rehearsal and concert space to a wide range of community service and arts groups. However, in 2013, full-time tenants were moved out of the Parish House. St. Ann's Church (organized 1787) was originally named in honor of Ann Ayscough Sands (1761–1851), who was an early patron with her husband Joshua Sands. The church previously occupied the elaborate High Victorian Gothic building still standing on the northeast corner of Clinton and Livingston streets, built 1877-1878 to designs by James Renwick Jr. of Renwick & Sands. That church, which featured stained glass by Henry E. Sharp, was sold to the Packer Collegiate Institute. The windows of St. Ann & the Holy Trinity Church were created by William Jay Bolton with the assistance of his brother, John Bolton, between 1845 and 1848. Though preceded by a figural window Bolton made for Christ Church Priory in Pelham, NY, these windows are the first complete canon, or set, of figural stained glass windows made in North America. The Bolton windows consist of six distinct sets totaling 55 glass installations, of which 54 remain. When the church reopened in 1969, the problem of repairing the large building after a long period of deferred maintenance initiated many conservation projects and campaigns for the complicated and costly task of restoring the church and its endangered stained glass windows. The World Monuments Fund in collaboration with the St. Ann's Center for Restoration and the Arts initiated projects in 1988 and continued repairs led to the site's listing in the World Monuments Watch in 2002 and 2004.

Location

Categories

Property data from the National Register of Historic Places, National Park Service (public domain).

Description adapted from Wikipedia under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

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