The Many Houses of God: Photos of NYC's Houses of Worship..

[Princess Turandot]

I like taking photographs of buildings, especially houses of worship. So far, I have about 160 that I've taken of such buildings in Manhattan south of 34th Street (and a few strays from elsewhere.) Many of the pages, although not yet all, include info about the building. Given NYC's extraordinary ethnic diversity, there are a wide variety of buildings, ranging from store fronts to ornate cathedrals. Several of them have been recycled from one faith to another. (The church where my parents married was for a very brief time the location of Temple Emanu-el, now NYC's most prominent synagogue!) If anyone is interested in seeing them, click on this link:

http://www.panoramio.com/user/11963/tags/Religious

You can mouse over the thumbnails to see the photo's description.

One caveat however. If you open a photo's page, you to need to page backwards in your browser to return to the thumbnails. (There is a forward button on the individual photo pages but that will take you to the next photo in my album, not the next photo in the religious tag group.)

Also, you can also click on a tag on the right hand side of my album to get a subset of the group, such as 'Roman Catholic' or 'synagogue'.

So far, this photo which caught a falcon zooming over Grace Church in Greenwich Village, is the best of the set by far. (I never saw him; my jaw dropped when I saw the pic on my computer.)

cheers,
P. T

[47of74]

1. Excellent photo..thank you for sharing this with us

[Princess Turandot]

2. Thanks 47of 74....

I thought that my collection of NYC houses of worship (etc.) would be of more interest but I guess they are not.

The falcon above Grace Episcopal is a keeper, to be sure. Grace is a very fine church despite it's being a prelude to Renwick's masterpiece of St. Pat's.

[Brigid]

3. These are beautiful.

I especially like the one of Old Saint Patrick's Cathedral. I didn't know it was used as the location for that famous scene in the "The Godfather." :)

[Princess Turandot]

4. Thanks, Brigid...

Happily, Old St. Pat's is a NYC landmark and important to Church history, so I think it remains secure as a Catholic religious building. It has an interesting history. A black slave, who had been born in Haiti and was eventually brought (and freed) in NYC, contributed much to its funding. His name was Pierre Toussaint; he's likely to be the first black American canonized. (I posted a bit about him in the AAI Group here: http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=258x2983#6170 ) He was originally buried there but was moved to the vault within St. Patrick's on 5th Avenue in 1990. I think he may be the only non-cleric interred there. It was John Cardinal O'Connor who ordered the move, so it's probably not surprising that Mrs. Toussaint was left behind.

Taking photos of religious buildings in NYC is a hard business! And it's not just the narrow angle of view. I've been yelled at by elderly women inside an Episcopal church who were sitting on a pew on a weekday just yapping with each other (I shoot w/o flash to not bother anyone), invited to a post-service coffee in a Slavic Lutheran church by another elderly lady who left the service when she spotted me outside of the church (not yet posted to my collection), given recruitment materials by a Jehovah's Witness and had an interesting conversation with an Orthodox Jew who was visiting his childhood neighborhood for the first time in 40 years, interrupted when the same Jehovah's Witness Group invited his adult son to take a walk around the corner with them to their church. Hopefully I'll survive expanding my collection!

[47of74]

5. Actually two churches were used

The interior shots were at Old St. Patrick's Cathedral. The exterior shots were of the Mission of the Immaculate Virgin at Mount Loretto in Pleasant Plains, New York. Mount Loretto was largely destroyed by fire about a year after the filming was done. The steeple and facade were saved and incorporated into a new structure built to replace the original church.