St. Ann's Church (Manhattan)

Not to be confused with St. Ann's Roman Catholic Church (Manhattan).

The Former Church of St. Ann
Photograph taken prior to 1879 by Ewing Galloway
General information
Town or city	New York, New York
Country	United States of America
Demolished	c.1890
Technical details
Structural system	Masonry
Design and construction
Client	The Protestant Episcopal Church in the United States of America

St. Ann’s Church was a former nineteenth-century Protestant Episcopal church of Manhattan’s Lower East Side, New York City. It is notable for its many reuses before ultimately disappearing from records, first as a Roman Catholic church, then adaptively reused as a factory, and finally as a theater.

The Episcopal Church of St. Ann, was located on Eighth Street, near Fourth Avenue and Astor Place. Similar to many Anglican parishes in mid-nineteenth-century New York City, the church elected to rebuild on an uptown site and sold their former building to an emerging congregation of another denomination, which frequently moved like a hermit crab from one abandoned church to another. In this case the purchaser was the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of New York.^[1]

The Catholics retained the church’s dedication of St. Ann for their parish of St. Ann (established 1852, possibly indicating the Episcopalian’s sale of the church) but later abandoned it in favor of a redundant Presbyterian church.^[2] In 1871, the Archdiocese then sold the former St. Ann’s to the department store mogul Mr. A. T. Stewart, who they continued to buy and sell properties and building fragments from. The former church was recorded by the New York Express in 1876 as a factory for A.T. Stewart and Company.^[3] It was adaptively reused as the Aberle’s Theater in 1879.^[4] The last record of the Aberle Theater was in 1880.^[5] It likely has been demolished since.

East 12th St

The Roman Catholic parish of St. Ann eventually relocated to 110 East 12th Street,^[6] a former Armenian Rite Cathedral and Shrine, but was closed in 2003.

References

1. ^ J. Russiello, A Sympathetic Planning Hierarchy for Redundant Churches: A Comparison of Continued Use and Reuse in Denmark, England and the United States of America (MSc Conservation of Historic Buildings, University of Bath, 2008), p386.
2. ^ Remigius Lafort, S.T.D., Censor, The Catholic Church in the United States of America: Undertaken to Celebrate the Golden Jubilee of His Holiness, Pope Pius X. Volume 3: The Province of Baltimore and the Province of New York, Section 1: Comprising the Archdiocese of New York and the Diocese of Brooklyn, Buffalo and Ogdensburg Together with some Supplementary Articles on Religious Communities of Women.. (New York City: The Catholic Editing Company, 1914), p.312-313.
3. ^ “St. Ann’s Catholic Church in Eighth-Street to be Sold;” and Robert A. M. Stern, Thomas Mellins, and David Fishman, New York 1880: Architecture and Urbanism in the Gilded Age (New York: The Monacelli Press, 1999), 770, 772, 773. See also Robert Miles Parker, The Upper West Side, New York (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1988), p.35
4. ^ Mary Johna Grzeskowiak, The Adaptive Use of Religious Structures, Rochester, New York: A Case Study (MSc Historic Preservation, Columbia University, 1986), p.10.
5. ^ “St. Ann’s Catholic Church in Eighth-Street to be Sold;” and Robert A. M. Stern, Thomas Mellins, and David Fishman, New York 1880: Architecture and Urbanism in the Gilded Age (New York: The Monacelli Press, 1999), 770, 772, 773.
6. ^ The World Almanac 1892 and Book of Facts (New York: Press Publishing, 1892), p.390.