The Former Church of St. Ann | |
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St. Ann's Church, Manhattan, E 8th Street and 4th Avenue; Photo prior to 1879 from Ewing Galloway.jpg Photograph taken prior to 1879 by Ewing Galloway |
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General information | |
Town or city | New York, New York |
Country | United States of America |
Demolished | c.1890 |
Technical details | |
Structural system | Masonry |
Design and construction | |
Client | The Protestant Episcopal Church in the United States of America |
St. Ann’s Church was a former nineteenth-century Protestant Episcopal church of Manhattan’s Lower East Side, New York City. It is notable for its many reuses before ultimately disappearing from records, first as a Roman Catholic church, then adaptively reused as a factory, and finally as a theater.
The Episcopal Church of St. Ann, was located on Eighth Street, near Fourth Avenue and Astor Place. Similar to many Anglican parishes in mid-nineteenth-century New York City, the church elected to rebuild on an uptown site and sold their former building to an emerging congregation of another denomination, which frequently moved like a hermit crab from one abandoned church to another. In this case the purchaser was the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of New York.[1]
The Catholics retained the church’s dedication of St. Ann for their parish of St. Ann (established 1852, possibly indicating the Episcopalian’s sale of the church) but later abandoned it in favor of a redundant Presbyterian church.[2] In 1871, the Archdiocese then sold the former St. Ann’s to the department store mogul Mr. A. T. Stewart, who they continued to buy and sell properties and building fragments from. The former church was recorded by the New York Express in 1876 as a factory for A.T. Stewart and Company.[3] It was adaptively reused as the Aberle’s Theater in 1879.[4] The last record of the Aberle Theater was in 1880.[5] It likely has been demolished since.
The Roman Catholic parish of St. Ann eventually relocated to 110 East 12th Street,[6] a former Armenian Rite Cathedral and Shrine, but was closed in 2003.