St. Thomas Episcopal Church has been a New York institution since its founding in 1823/4. It has had four buildings, the first two 'uptown' on Broadway at Houston Street before it moved further uptown to Fifth Avenue and 53rd Street in 1870. The third building, scene of the marriage of Consuelo Vanderbilt to the Duke of Marlborough, was designed by Richard Upjohn. It burned in 1905.
The present church, the fourth, is a designated New York landmark that was designed by Ralph Adams Cram and Bertram G. Goodhue, also architects of St. Bartholomew's. First designs date from 1906; built 1911 - 1914, it opened for services in 1913.
This masterpiece of a city church, with bold massing and a strong profile, has plain ashlar limestone surfaces in French High Gothic style, embellished with dense French Flamboyant Gothic detail in the window tracery, in the small arches of the triforium and in the rich pale stonework of the reredos, where Bertrand Goodhue's original genius in decoration, and sculpture designed by Lee Lawry, are inspired by the altar screen at Winchester Cathedral in England.
St. Thomas church is characterized by a high main arcade and an open triforium and clerestory. Making the most of a restricted rectangular urban corner site with no space for transepts, St Thomas has the scale of a large parish church (which it is), but the proportions of a small cathedral, with a nave 95 feet high.
The church, like Cram and Goodhue's Cathedral of Saint John the Divine, also in New York, is built of stone on stone, without any steel reinforcing. The ribs of the vault are load-bearing structure. Cram's approach to a structurally authentic and a scholarly but not imitative Gothic style emphasized originality through logical development of the historical Gothic styles, tempered by creative scholarship. In a letter of 1925 Cram said that he considered a rigorous modern Gothic to be "a logical continuation of the great Christian culture of the past, but also a vital contribution to modern life."
Cram excelled at planning buildings and at the general massing of forms, while Goodhue had an inventive eye for appropriate decorative detail. Often each worked on separate buildings, depending on the advice and approval of the other. Sometimes, as at St. Thomas, they worked together on major projects.
The men and boys' choir of St. Thomas Church (Gerre Hancock, director) is celebrated.
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