West Park Presbyterian Church

Amid the scores of high-rise luxury apartment buildings lining West 86th Street, you’ll find an oddity of sorts. A red sandstone Romanesque Revival style church building sits under a scaffold at the corner of West 86th and Amsterdam Avenue. With its ornate windows and a tower at least 10 stories high that overlooks the intersection, the building sets itself apart from most others in this primarily residential neighborhood.

The West Park Presbyterian Church on 86th and Amsterdam. The church, which has recently been declared a landmark, is now up for sale.

This building—West Park Presbyterian Church—has had more than its fair share of controversy, the latest of which involving its designation as a New York City Landmark. The city’s Landmark Preservation Commission voted to make the church a landmark in January, and that vote was upheld by the City Council, making it official on May 13.

“It’s the beginning of a new chapter in the life of West Park,” said Cristiana Pena of Landmark West, a preservationist non-profit group for historic structures on the Upper West Side, who added that over 1,000 New Yorkers signed petitions that supported preserving the church.

According to PlanNYC.org, a website run by NYU’s Furman Center for Real Estate & Urban Policy, the church had been dealing with its mounting debt by attempting to sell off some of its real estate to developers. One plan called for a total demolition of the 120-year-old structure and having a modern glass tower built in its place. Another called for a partial demolition of the structure, with a good deal of the original church building remaining, but having the church’s offices on the west side of the building demolished and replaced with a modern residential tower, with affordable housing set aside. However, city records show that this plan was rejected in January 2009.

“Unfortunately, structures as beautiful and significant as West Park Presbyterian Church have become scarce in our city,” said City Council Member Gail Brewer at a hearing last July before the Landmark Preservation Commission. “The West Side and the city as a whole cannot afford to see any more of its treasures demolished to make way for more bland, uninteresting residential towers that have encroached on so many blocks in our community.”

West Park has been dealt many setbacks, even before its designation as an official landmark. The church building on Amsterdam Avenue currently stands vacant, and the congregation now meets at the Church of St. Paul and St. Andrew, two blocks away on West 86th Street and West End Avenue. Records from the New York City Department of Buildings show that a work permit for “partial interior & exterior structural demolition” was granted in February 2008, but just one week later, a stop work order was issued, and there’s been no work done on the church since then. Within the past few weeks, a “FOR SALE” sign was put up on the scaffold under the church, indicating that West Park may be completely done with the church building now that they can’t go forward with their plans.

The fight over the church’s landmark status has sometimes gotten ugly. According to Manhattan news blog DNAinfo.com, Diego Meneses, a West Park official, was arrested last month while painting an anti-Gale Brewer statement on the scaffold under the church. Not long after that, an as-of-yet unknown vandal rearranged letters in a glass-encased sign reading “WEST PARK SAYS NO FORCED LANDMARK OF OUR CHURCH,” to say “WEST PARK SAYS LANDMARK OUR CHURCH.”

Some Upper West Siders believe that making the church a landmark was the right thing to do.

“It’s a unique building,” said Michael Thomas, 44. “I’m glad that it’s a landmark, I would definitely hate to see something like this destroyed.”

However, some others lean towards the church’s position.

“I really wish they would have respected the wishes of the church,” said Ana Ramirez, 56, who’s lived on the Upper West Side for most of her life. “It’s a nice building, but what is the church going to do now?”

Neither Reverend Robert Brashear, head pastor of West Park, nor Councilwoman Gale Brewer, responded to repeated requests for comment for this article.