Most Holy Redeemer Church: Cultural Heritage
Village Preservation is working with fellow local preservation organizations and parishioners to preserve the endangered, historic Most Holy Redeemer Church at 173 East 3rd Street, between Avenues A and B in the East Village.
The church was once one of the city’s tallest structures. Founded in 1844 by German-speaking Redemptorist missionaries amid the growing German influx in the neighborhood then called Kleindeutschland, it was completed in 1851. You can read more about its noteworthy architectural history here.
While the church is certainly worthy of landmark designation based on architectural merit, the “German Cathedral of the Lower East Side” is significant for more than its design and construction alone — the building had a major cultural impact over the last nearly two centuries in many ways, from the use of Gregorian chant in Catholic churches to innovations in electricity for religious structures, and fire safety citywide.
The following is a timeline of just some of the critical cultural moments connected to the site during its first hundred years:
1830s-40s
In 1832, a small band of Redemptorist Fathers, a congregation of missionary priests and deacons, first traveled from Vienna to New York City endeavoring to establish a church for the local German-speaking Catholic immigrant population, who had no permanent place of worship in their new home. These first Redemptorists soon returned to Europe, but a subsequent group arrived in 1841. Among them was Father Gabriel Rumpler, who promptly gave Mass at St. Nicholas German Catholic Church, or Deutsche Römisch-Katholische St. Nicholas Kirche, which by then stood at 127 East 2nd Street, one block south of what would become the Most Holy Redeemer site.
Founded in 1833, St. Nicholas parish was the very first German-language Catholic parish in New York City, soon to be followed by Most Holy Redeemer. St. Nicholas was demolished in 1960 for a parking lot, and thus Most Holy Redeemer, founded in the 1840s and dedicated in 1852, is the only extant ecclesiastic building representing this heritage in the neighborhood.
1880s
The congregation and associated school continued to grow during its first half-century. But in 1883, tragedy struck when a fire at the school, located directly behind the church building on East 4th Street, caused the death of 16 children when a rush of students, reacting to the smoke and fire, led to a crush of bodies unable to escape the building. This devastating accident had profound and lasting impacts upon regulatory regimes in the city, spurring the implementation of fire safety reforms such as first-time requirements for fire escapes, wider stairwells, and unlocked doors and doors that open outward for fire escape routes at schools citywide. Such requirements remain in effect to this day.
1880s-90s
During Kleindeutschland’s population peak, Most Holy Redeemer was thriving, and the building enjoyed a number of interior upgrades. Father Andrew Ziegler, the newly appointed pastor, introduced marble flooring and communion railings in 1884, and a decade later, the building was notably situated at the forefront of technological advancements for church buildings in the United States. In February of 1894, it had become one of the first churches, if not the first, to have electric lighting installed throughout its interior.
1900s
On December 9, 1903, Pope Pius X declared that Gregorian chant was to replace classical and Baroque melodies in the Catholic Church. It was reported by The Sun that during Most Holy Redeemer’s 60th anniversary mass on April 24, 1904, its service was “the first complete Gregorian programme to be used in this country since the Pope issued his encyclical on the reform of music.”
1910s
Another innovation took place when, in January of 1914, not twenty years after Most Holy Redeemer was among the first churches to utilize electricity, parishioner, electrical mechanic, and inventor John Rebeschung strung wires from the sacristy to the bell tower, making it the possible first church in the world to utilize electric bell ringing.
1920s-30s
Activist Dorothy Day, who is currently a candidate for sainthood, has many well-documented and celebrated ties to the East Village. Two of the extant places she was directly involved with include Maryhouse at 55 East 3rd Street and the St. Joseph House at 36 East 1st Street, both Catholic Worker sites of which Day was a co-founder. But many may not know of her connection to Most Holy Redeemer Church, located just a couple blocks east of these sites.
Day moved to the Lower East Side in 1916 at the age of 19, and became entrenched in the anarchical and literary communities of Greenwich Village and the East Village; she converted to Catholicism in 1927. During this period of her life, Day was known to frequently attend Mass at St. Joseph’s Church, located at the corner of Sixth Avenue and Washington Place. A number of the other churches she was associated with in the Village have since been derelegated and/or demolished, but one other still stands: though never her “main” church, Day often attended services at Most Holy Redeemer. To this day, there is a shrine dedicated to her near its entrance. As perhaps the only extant church with direct ties to Day in her former neighborhood, this is yet another crucial layer of Most Holy Redeemer’s history.
Most Holy Redeemer’s religious and cultural history complements its architectural and visual prominence, all contributing to the value of the building and its deservingness to become an individual NYC landmark.
Click here to join our campaign to save the building and secure its landmark designation.