A Friday Special Feature: Re-setting our eyes to St. Stephen’s Gothicness
St. Stephen’s in 1828
As a sidebar to last Friday’s Anniversary Thoughts on the vision of St. Stephen’s made physical, let’s look at St. Stephen’s striking façade—most of it intact—since it embodies the church on the street as our introduction to the whole.
Set among such familiar “early American” urban architecture, its Old World “castle like” stone front (attached to a simple stucco’d brick body with soaring pointed-arch windows) catches our eye today as it may have then, to judge by the 1828 woodcut.
The new church was introduced to the public as a “bold and impressive” “Gothic structure” in a description (possibly by its architect William Strickland) appended to Hobart’s published consecration sermon (The Worship of the Church on Earth, 1823). The façade lacked the planned “Ogee [curved] Domes, and the appropriate Cross, Ball, and Vane” to make it a “correct specimen of the Gothic architecture of the middle ages” (Description, in Hobart 1823, 18-20). The ogee domes were soon jettisoned, leaving the fortress-like structure.
Then you moved from that “bold” exterior to the embracing and reverence-inspiring interior that Hobart extolled (see last Friday’s Anniversary Thoughts). For St. Stephen’s much later rector, The Rev. Dr. Alfred W. Price (1942-1972), this distinctive towered façade, which he made the logo of his service leaflets, embodied the sanctuary provided by God: “The Name of the Lord is a strong tower: the righteous runneth into it, and is safe” (Prov. 18:10).
Trinity Wall Street Church
And what about its “Gothicness?”
St. Stephen’s looks strange to most of us used to the more formulaic later Gothic Revival, like Richard Upjohn’s iconic Trinity Wall Street Church (NYC) consecrated in 1846.
For decades, scholars dismissed St. Stephen’s for misunderstanding the Gothic: superficial ornaments without the underlying Gothic structure.
Eton College Chapel
On its smaller, simplified scale, St. Stephen’s nonetheless loosely evokes British Late Gothic college chapels like Eton of c. 1440, with its twin rounded towers
We’ve come to appreciate, however, that the Gothic style flowed from blended survivals into revival forms with new combinations in the eighteenth century and immediately after. St. Stephen’s, I think, fits comfortably in the latter.
Episcopal Christ Church
However Strickland incorporated the existing Methodist church on this site, I see St. Stephen’s as a striking example of the American branch of what’s now called the British Georgian Gothic revival style that’s best known through the work of Strickland’s master, Benjamin Latrobe and his circle. The first decades of the 19th c saw several Episcopal and Roman Catholic churches using this revival approach, like the Episcopal Christ Church in Washington DC (1806-8), by Latrobe’s colleague Robert Alexander.
Dorsey’s Gothic Mansion
By the time St. Stephen’s was consecrated, Philadelphia was dotted with American Georgian Gothic buildings—many of them NOT churches, beginning with Latrobe’s picturesque Sedgeley Cottage of 1799-1802 on a bucolic stretch of the Schuylkill. Urban Gothic buildings surrounded St. Stephen’s; most notably:
Strickland, Masonic Hall
“Dorsey’s Gothic Mansion” of about 1811 that this merchant supposedly designed and lived in himself at 1217 Chestnut Street.
Strickland’s first Masonic Hall of 1809/13 on Chestnut St. that burned in 1819.
And his Swedenborgian Temple of the New Jerusalem (1816-17) at 12th and today’s Sansom St. (soon the Academy of Natural Sciences).
They differ strikingly from each other. And all but St. Stephen’s are gone, leaving it to bear witness to the freedom of the revival architecture that spiced our streets and spoke to us so engagingly. Keep them in your mind’s eye when you look at St. Stephen’s either in person or here, virtually!
— Suzanne Glover Lindsay, St. Stephen’s historian and curator