ST. MARK'S CHURCH: SKY-WRITING SPIRAL
ABBOTT FILE 214

ST. MARK'S CHURCH
ABBOTT FILE 215

ST. MARK'S CHURCH: CLOISTER
ABBOTT FILE 216

ST. MARK'S CHURCH: STATUE IN COURTYARD
East 10th Street and Second Avenue
MARCH 23, 1937. ABBOTT FILE 218

St. Mark's church, 1930-31 (CGLI)

St. Mark's-in-the-Bowerie (Dutch for farm) stands on the site of the family chapel of Peter Stuyvesant. The churchyard holds the remains of seven generations of Stuyvesants and many New York luminaries, such as New York mayor-diarist Philip Hone (1780-1852) and merchant-king A. T. Stewart (circa 1802-1876). The present structure was dedicated in 1799, and its 1826 steeple was designed by the noted Greek Revival architect Ithiel Town.

St. Mark's Church, Entrance, discarded image

By the turn of the century, the church's more genteel congregants had abandoned the neighborhood, which was populated with Italian, Slavic, and Eastern European Jewish immigrants. Under the radical leadership of the Reverand Dr. William Norman Guthrie, who served as rector from 1910 to 1937, the congregation was revitalized and gained national fame. Guthrie appealed to the bohemian and intellectual community of adjacent Greenwich Village with a pan-religious program, which featured ritual music and dance from 80 different cultures. He commissioned the sculpture of an Indian girl in prayer near the church entrance, and the fresco of pagan dancers in the church's pediment. Designated a landmark in 1978, the church suffered a major fire during restoration and was subsequently rebuilt.

Between 1930 and 1933, Abbott photographed St. Mark's from across the broad intersection of Second Avenue and East 10th Street. This earlier photograph showed the entire church structure and, in the foreground, a trolley, a pushcart, and a stickball game. Returning to the site in 1937, Abbott composed five close-ups, none of which show the church fully. In the best of the new compositions, Abbott captured a skywriter's smoky spiral emerging from behind the aged steeple. This image, included in Changing New York, perfectly expresses the project's central motive of contrasting old and new.

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