The Interchurch Center is a 19-story granite-clad office building located at 475 Riverside Drive and West 120th Street in New York City. Besides renting to many secular non-profits, it is the headquarters for the National Council of Churches USA and its sister humanitarian organization Church World Service, and also houses a wide variety of church agencies and ecumenical and interfaith organizations as well as many secular organizations.[1]
Its concentration of religious organizations has led some to nickname the building the God Box.[2] The current tenants include agencies of the United Church of Christ, the United Methodist Church, the American Baptist Churches in the U.S.A., the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, Reformed Church in America and the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.).[3] Samuel G. Freedman describes the building as the closest thing to a Vatican for America’s mainline Protestant denominations. The mainline churches include the Episcopal, Lutheran Presbyterian, Methodist and United Church of Christ (Congregationalists) denominations.[4]
The Center benefits from a strong religious and educational environment. One of its tenants is the New York Theological Seminary. The building is located across from The Riverside Church, Union Theological Seminary and Columbia University and is a short walk to Jewish Theological Seminary, Manhattan School of Music, and the Episcopal Cathedral of St. John the Divine, all in the Morningside Heights neighborhood of Manhattan's Upper West Side. It is convenient to public rail transportation via subway line #1 at 116th Street, the M60 bus line from LaGuardia Airport, and north-south bus routes M5 on Riverside Drive and M4 and M104 on Broadway.
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The Center was built in 1958 with gifts by John D. Rockefeller and other donors, together with a consortium of religious denominations, with the objective of encouraging cooperative work among such diverse religious groups as the Orthodox, African-American, and mainstream Protestant denominations and to foster the growth of ecumenical bodies such as the National Council of Churches USA.
In the presence of a crowd of more than 30,000 gathered at the building site,[5] the Center's cornerstone was laid by then-President Dwight D. Eisenhower, whose Secretary of State, John Foster Dulles, and Secretary of Health, Education and Welfare, Arthur S. Flemming, were active in the work of the National Council of Churches.
In 1969 Black militant James Forman led a series of sit-ins at denominational offices in the building, demanding that the denominations pay reparations to Black Americans. At the height of the protests, half of the Center's 2,000 employees stayed away form work in support of Forman.[6] The New York State Supreme Court finally barred Forman form the building.[7]
The Center's current occupants[8] include mission boards, pension boards, and other agencies of several national denominations. Expanding on its original mission of providing a collaborative environment for a community of widely differing Christian denominations and their ecumenical activities, the Center now also houses a growing number of interfaith groups, including The Interfaith Center of New York, plus several Jewish and Muslim organizations.
Over the 50-year history of the facility, some national churches such as the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America and the Presbyterian Church USA, following mergers with sister churches, relocated their primary offices to cities nearer to the majority of their constituencies, but have continued to maintain significant operations in the Interchurch Center.
Several city and state denominational offices, the Council of Churches of the City of New York, and groups as varied as Agricultural Missions, Inc., and the Foundation for Christian Higher Education in Asia also occupy space in the Center, along with offices and classrooms of New York Theological Seminary, and offices of The Rockefeller Brothers Fund.
National interfaith ministries in the building include Religion Communicators Council, Odyssey Networks (a religious media distribution agency of the National Interfaith Cable Coalition), and the Interfaith Center for Corporate Responsibility.
The simplicity of the building's architecture has caused some critics to disparage its design. Columbia University architecture historian Andrew Dolkart calls the Center "an undistinguished, bulky, limestone building."[9] Other critics have called it "clumsily articulated," and "a squat cube,"[10]
Amenities provided to organizations and agencies who occupy the Center are:
A Wednesday noontime concert series during the spring and fall features classical, gospel, jazz and choral music at no charge and open to the general public. The Interchurch Center Chorus and the Gospel Choir, both populated by tenant employees, present periodic concerts in the Center's chapel.