An 1893 Italian Renaissance church, still an active congregation
Judson Memorial Church, facing Washington Square Park in New York City, was built in 1893 by Edward Judson as a memorial to his missionary father Adoniram Judson, designed by Stanford White with stained glass by John La Farge, and remains an active Baptist congregation known for staging the Judson Dance Theater and founding the Clergy Consultation Service on Abortion.
A son built a church to honour his missionary father
Judson Memorial Church is a Baptist church that still holds services, facing Washington Square Park from the south side. Its sanctuary, bell tower, and attached hall were designed by Stanford White, with stained glass by John La Farge.
The church exists because of one man's father. Edward Judson was pastor of a small Baptist congregation on Downing Street in the 1870s. Edward Judson wanted a bigger, bolder church, one that could draw together the wealthy families north of the square and the immigrant poor crowding in from the south. In 1887, Edward Judson began raising money, with backing from John D. Rockefeller, and named the new building for his father, Adoniram Judson, one of the first American Protestant missionaries sent to Burma.
Construction started in 1888. Edward laid the cornerstone on June 30, 1890, and sealed a copy of his father's Burmese Bible translation inside it. The church opened in 1893. Saint-Gaudens designed a marble frieze for the baptistry, carved by sculptor Herbert Adams. A bell tower by the same architectural firm, McKim, Mead and White, went up next door in 1895 and 1896.
Edward's dream of rich and poor worshiping side by side never quite worked. Wealthy families mostly stayed away. By 1913, the congregation could no longer support the building, and the city's Baptist Mission Society took over its finances and its debts. Judson would not get its independence back for sixty years.
A free health clinic filled the church basement for decades
New York University bought the Judson Hotel and tower from the Baptist Mission Society in 1925, while the church itself kept running its own programs. In 1921, the church offered its basement to Eleanor A. Campbell, a pioneering physician, who turned it into a free health clinic. The Judson Health Center grew into one of the largest clinics of its kind in the country, serving the neighborhood's Italian immigrant families until it moved to Spring Street in 1950.
In the 1920s, the church also ran a settlement house on Sullivan Street. Through the Depression, under pastor Laurence Hosie, the congregation let homeless men sleep in its pews. After World War II, the church turned its old parish house into a residence for international students of every race.
A minister turned the sanctuary into a theatre and clinic network
Howard Moody became senior minister in 1957 and stayed thirty-five years. He pushed Judson into causes most churches avoided. In 1962, he hired Al Carmines as associate minister and gave him the sanctuary to build a theater. The Judson Poets' Theater and the Judson Dance Theater followed, launching the careers of choreographers like Yvonne Rainer and Trisha Brown. Visual artists including Claes Oldenburg and Robert Rauschenberg staged early shows there too.
Moody's politics went further than the arts. In 1967, he helped found the Clergy Consultation Service on Abortion, a network of ministers and rabbis who quietly referred women to safe abortions years before Roe v. Wade made it legal. The group grew to 1,400 clergy nationwide, run out of Judson's offices. In the 1960s, the church also became a gathering place for gay rights activists, hosting protests in 1966 against police raids on gay bars.
By 1973, the congregation had rebuilt enough strength to take back ownership of its building from the city's Baptist Mission Society, ending sixty years of outside control.
A land sale to NYU funded the sanctuary's restoration
Peter Laarman became senior pastor after Moody retired in 1990, steering the church toward economic justice work while keeping its ties to the arts. In 1999, facing money troubles again, the church sold its old parish house behind the sanctuary to the NYU School of Law, which built Furman Hall on the site. The new building rose eleven stories, towering over the church and the park beyond it, and stirred anger in the neighborhood over its scale.
Between 1990 and 2006, the church spent the proceeds of that sale, plus roughly a million more dollars raised from donors, repainting and repairing the sanctuary, cleaning La Farge's stained glass, and adding an elevator and air conditioning.
Services continue while offices share NYU's law building
Across the street, the lot now numbered 3 Washington Square North holds a building put up in 2013, nearly ten acres of New York University ground facing the park from its north side. It sits apart from the church's own story, a modern addition to the blocks around the square rather than part of Judson's history.
Judson Memorial Church still holds Sunday services today. Its offices now share a condominium suite in Furman Hall, the NYU law building that replaced its old parish house, while the 1893 sanctuary and bell tower remain standing on Washington Square South, still carrying La Farge's windows and Saint-Gaudens's frieze.
The church still stands across the park, its bell tower and sanctuary unchanged since 1896.
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