Riverside Church

When Dr. Harry Emerson Fosdick accepted the call to the Park Avenue Baptist Church, he made three conditions: that the Church should erect a new building near Columbia University, should open its membership to all Christians regardless of dogma and should not insist upon the principle of Baptism by immersion. The Church agreed. It would go a long way to get Dr. Fosdick, the most celebrated pulpit-orator of his generation.

The last two conditions were not difficult to meet. They were matters of doctrine; a meeting, a solemn announcement, and the thing was done. But Dr. Fosdick's first condition was a matter of steel, concrete and cash. The Park Avenue Baptist Church took some time to work out its plans.

Last week these plans pealed forth.

The new church will stand at Riverside Drive and 122nd Street.* Its tower will be 375 feet high. It will cost $4,000,000. Charles Collens and Henry Pelton are the architects. The inside will be Romanesque, the outside Gothic. Elevators will run up through 20 stories of women's rooms, sewing-rooms, lecture-rooms, schoolrooms, offices in the tower; stairs will go down to robing-rooms, Sunday school rooms, choir-rooms, locker-rooms, kitchens in the basement. There will be bolwing alleys and a basketball court -- details which and do not reflect Dr. Fosdick, but are a counterpart to his prime interest in preaching. In the top of the tower, with four new bells, will be the carillon, gift of John D. Rockefeller Jr., which last year disturbed the people of Park Avenue.

Architects Collens and Pelton went from Paris to Barcelona in a motor car last summer to get ideas for the new church. They studied how the Gothic architects threw stone into the sky like lace. It took them 21 days. At Le Mans, Carcassonne, Burgos, Leon, Valencia, Salamanca, Segovia and Toledo, they admired the Cathedrals, but they liked Chartres best.

Chartres will be the model for the Riverside Church, though in fundamental principles only.

*Not far from the site of the Rockefeller-Fosdick Church, another enormous building is going up--the Broadway Temple. Its Methodist pastor--Dr. Christian Reisner--was injured two weeks ago when he coasted on a Flexible Flyer with his son. Last week, from a hospital room, he renewed his campaign for $1,500,000 to pay the contractor.