Cultural Diversity, Ethnic Tensions, and Economic Marginality in an Early Bronx Settlement — Part 2

By Marian Swerdlow

This is Part 2 of an article bringing to light the widely neglected history of a very early dense Bronx settlement, Morrisania Village (1848).  The first part explained the choice to focus on the Villages churches, and provided a brief history and general description of the Village.  It discussed its Roman Catholic, Methodist and Congregational churches and their congregations, treating the themes mentioned in the article’s title.  This second part will discuss three other Village churches, continuing the emphasis on the title’s themes, and end by summarizing and analyzing the fates of all six from the Village’s dissolution in 1874 to the present day.

The Potts Memorial Church

Former Potts Memorial Presbyterian Church, 2018. Image courtesy of the author.

The First Presbyterian Church of the Village of Morrisania was organized at a meeting in September 1849.   The first trustees included Andrew Cauldwell, an immigrant from Scotland, whose house on Washington Avenue near 8th Street was the first to be built in Morrisania Village, and who was the father of William Cauldwell, an important 19th century NYC newspaperman, and Democratic Party politician. [1]

The New York Presbytery gave the new congregation three of the Village’s lots, one on Fordham Avenue, and the other two on Washington Avenue.  The congregation put up a very small building on the Fordham Avenue lot, and a pastor was installed in March of the following year. [2] However, the worshipers were members of many low church Protestant denominations and not all Presbyterians. As those other denominations formed congregations in the area, attendance at the small church dwindled. [3] Thus, almost exactly a year later, the congregation laid off its pastor because it “was financially too weak” to support him.  Six years later, a new Presbyterian congregation again proved to be financially unsustainable, and the lots of land were returned to the New York Presbytery. [4]

Reverend Arthur Potts writes that “[d]uring the winter of 1865, the attention of the Reverend Arthur Potts, of New York City, was called to the fact that the Presbyterian Church was not represented” in the Town of Morrisania. He gathered a group of Presbyterians, they hired a room, and began holding services there in January 1865. These services attracted sufficient attendance that by early the next month, they successfully requested recognition as the First Presbyterian Church of Morrisania from the New York Presbytery. Rather than wait to put up its own building, the fledgling congregation bought the Disciples Church, located on Washington Avenue, between 5th and 6th Streets, and moved there in May 1865. 

However, the former Disciples church was small, in disrepair and now heavily mortgaged.  Potts writes,

“The congregation of the University Place Church, corner of Tenth Street [in Manhattan] hearing that the son of their late Pastor - the Rev. George Potts, D.D. - was engaged in this work, made an offer of a sum sufficient to pay for, and repair [emphasis in original] the building which had been already purchased, on the condition that the name of the church was altered to ‘The Potts Memorial’ [emphasis in original] which they desired should be a tribute, and monument to the memory of their Pastor.  Accordingly, they received $9,000 [$360,000] and the title was changed. 

“The ‘Potts Memorial’ was thus extensively altered by the addition of a new spire, a fine toned bell, while the finish both of the exterior and interior was altered beyond recognition.” [5]

St. John’s German Evangelical Lutheran Church

St. John's Evangelical Lutheran Church, ca. 1876  Accessed October 25, 2019, https://archive.org/details/zurgrinnerungdas00stjo/page/18.

There were a significant number of Protestant families among the many German immigrants who settled early in the Village of Morrisania, and in the neighboring Melrose where villages were established only two years later.  They first attempted to form a congregation in 1852, holding services in a hall in Melrose, but could not agree on whether to build the congregation’s church in Morrisania or in Melrose. [6] Some went on to help found a German Methodist Church in Melrose in 1853, and others what became the Dutch Reformed Church of Melrose.  But consensus within the latter church soon broke down, and in 1860, some members left. [7]

On December 12 of that year, the secessionists met in Washington Hall, a beer saloon and social hall owned by Conrad Hubner, located on the north side of East 4th Street between Washington and Fordham Avenues, and formed Morrisania’s St. John’s German Evangelical Lutheran Church.  Mr. Hubner and John Eichler, who would soon own his own Morrisania Village brewery, were among the members of its first Church Council.   For the first five years, the congregation worshiped in the carpenter shop of one of its members. [8]

Toward the end of 1864, the congregation at last had the means to purchase a small lot on the steep slope of East 7th Street between Fordham and Fulton Avenues, and the following year built a modest woodframe church that could seat 150. It was dedicated on December 1, 1865, although the congregation couldn’t afford to build a steeple until twelve years later. [9]

John Eichler, the brewer, was representative of Morrisania Village’s German Americans, just as Chauncey Smith was of the native born of British descent.  Born in Bavaria in 1829, Eichler learned his craft as an apprentice in his hometown of Rothenberg, and then worked for breweries in Baden and Berlin.  Arriving in New York in 1853, he worked for the Ruppert brewery.  With money he saved, he bought Kolb’s brewery, a small building, at Fordham Avenue and 7th Street in 1865. [10] The Eichler brewery was for decades one of a row of up to four breweries that lined two long blocks of Fordham Avenue.  At various times, these included Zeltner, Jaeger, Rivinius and David Mayer. [11]

To the horror of the native born, low church Protestants, breweries, saloons, and beer gardens sprang up all over the Village, but especially up and down Fordham Avenue. German beer culture was welcoming to women and families, and not at all a male preserve.  After church on Sundays, a German American family would go to a beer hall, garden, or picnic ground, drink beer, eat, and perhaps enjoy the combination of athletic competitions and choral singing called Turnfestes.  Bowling was another pastime to accompany the enjoyment of the local lagers.  John Eichler’s community affiliations demonstrate the German American love of choral singing, including the German Liederkranz, the Beethoven Mannerchor, the Freimaurer Sangerbund (choral society), the Morrisania Sangerbund, and the Harmonic Singing Society.. [12] Villagers in Chauncey Smith’s ethno-religious group were scandalized.  They believed the sanctity of the Sabbath should be observed with sedate religious pursuits, not desecrated by beer,  sports, or secular singing.  They tried constantly to get blue laws passed by the state or the county, while the immigrant communities pushed back. [13]

St. Paul’s Episcopal Chapel

St. Paul's Chapel ca. 1850  Collection of the Museum of the City of New York.

In 1849, Rev. Abraham B. Carter, rector of St. Ann’s Episcopal Church in Mott Haven proposed as a “missionary enterprise” the founding of a chapel of St. Ann’s among the “quite poor” inhabitants of Morrisania. In remarks to the N.Y. Episcopal Diocese, the Rev. Carter opined, “They have not a single place of worship of any name among them . . . there is an open field for the establishment of an Episcopal Church.” [14] The chapel was not located within the boundaries of the Village of Morrisania, but literally across the street, and many Village residents worshiped there. It was established as a parish in 1853. [15] The map of the Town of Morrisania ca. 1865 shows a building labeled “St Pauls Epis Ch” on a lot directly adjacent to the northern border of the Village of Morrisania, between Washington and Fordham Avenues, and, slightly to its west, a smaller building labeled “Parsonage.” [15] A contemporary print shows a simple building with a gable roof, and a single tower, slightly higher than the peak of the roof, at its entrance.[16] Four small spires top the tower.

Almost all the Village churches faced financial difficulties in establishing, building, and retaining a home for their congregations. This reflects the Village’s economic precarity, and the scarce resources at its residents’ disposal. The Centenary Methodist Episcopal Church set off a chain of financially catastrophic events when it resorted to shoddy building materials in order to save money, finally mortgaging itself to the church hierarchy.  Even though land was donated to the Presbyterian congregation by its hierarchy, it struggled to survive for many years, only managing to achieve a habitable space for worship through the help of a wealthier Manhattan congregation, and by allowing the latter to choose its name. St. John’s German Evangelical Lutheran Church got its start thanks to a member who allowed the congregation to meet in his workshop until it could accumulate the wherewithal to buy a small lot in an undesirable location and build a modest wood structure. The First Congregational Church of Morrisania met in a rented room, then, it met in the completed parts of its church for years while the rest was under construction.  Even St. Augustine’s, aided by the wealth of the Roman Catholic Church, could not maintain a school.  The only church that seems to have been free of financial problems was St. Paul’s Episcopal, most likely because it started as a chapel of the church of the wealthy Morris family, St. Ann’s Church. 

Only two of the original congregations still survive: St. Paul’s Episcopal and The First Congregational Church of Morrisania. The disappearance of the others is part of the tale of repeated and sweeping changes in the ethnic and religious composition of the area. 

Only one church building from the time of the ancient Village still stands, the former Potts Memorial Church on Washington Avenue.  As for the “successor” buildings these congregations moved into after the dissolution of the Village, three of them — the former St. John’s German Evangelical Lutheran Church on Fulton Avenue, the First Congregational Church of Morrisania on Forest Avenue, and St. Paul’s Episcopal Church on Washington Avenue — still stand, although just outside the borders of the ancient Village. The latter two retain their  original congregations. Each of the three is a beautiful building in a very different style, and each well worth a visit.  The demolitions of the magnificent third St. Augustine’s church (1895 - 2013), and of the historic former Centenary Methodist Episcopal Church (2019), are part of the story of an area that has been one of the poorest in New York City for over half a century.  Whereas such buildings in wealthier parts of the city likely would have benefitted from local struggles to preserve them, here they were neglected and allowed to deteriorate to the point where the hierarchies that owned them could justify their destruction.

Marian Swerdlow was born and raised in Morrisania, the Bronx. She is the author of Underground Woman: My Four Years as a New York City Subway Conductor (Temple University Press:1998). She received her Ph.D. in Sociology from Columbia University, and her work has appeared in Review of Radical Political Economics and Gender and Society, among other publications. Her most recent publication is "The Sacco and Vanzetti of the Bronx," Work History News, Winter/Spring 2025.

[1] Thomas Scharf, op. cit., v. 1, part 2, 825; The National Cyclopaedia of American Biography (New York City: Jame T. White and Co., 1898) 237 - 8, accessed February 14, 2024.

[2] Reverend Arthur Potts, “First Presbyterian Church, Morrisania,” in D.B. Frisbee, and William T. Coles, op. cit. xxvii; William James Cumming, The Presbyterian Church Within the Field of the Presbytery of Westchester, 1660 - 1889 (Hartford, Connecticut: Press of the Case, Lockwood, and Brainard Co., 1889); 178 accessed on February 16, 2024, https://books.google.com/books?id=E 5NAQAAMAAJ&pg=PA177&dq=%E2%80%9CThe+Presbyterian+Church+Within+the+Field+of+the+Presbytery+of+Westchester,+1660+1889&hl=en&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwjqlO2tscTkAhUHJt8KHVCGC1MQ6AEwAHoECAYQAg#v=onepage&q=%E2%80%9CThe%20Presbyterian%20Church%20Within%20the%20Field%20of%20the%20Presbytery%20of%20Westchester%2C%201660%20-%201889&f=false.

[3] Reverend Arthur Potts, op. cit., xxvii.

[4] All prices are given in their present day equivalent; 125th Anniversary Souvenir Book, 1974,  accessed March 12, 2024,  https://d2wldr9tsuuj1b.cloudfront.net/10193/documents/2015/6/Scan_Doc0001.pdf.

[5] Reverend Arthur Potts, op. cit. xxvii - xxviii.[6] William James Cumming, op. cit., 178.

[6] Joel Schwartz, op. cit. 105; Zur Grinnerung an das Goldene Jubilaum der Deutschen Evangelish [Booklet commemorating 50th Anniversary of St. John’s German Lutheran Evangelical Church, 1910]19 accessed March 2, 2024 https://archive.org/details/zurgrinnerungdas00stjo/Joel Schwartz, op. cit.105-6.

[7] Ibid. 106.

[8] Zur Grinnerung an das Goldene Jubilaum der Deutschen Evangelish, op. cit.19; Joel Schwartz, op. cit. 106.

[9] Ibid. 19 - 20.

[10] Georg von Skal, History of German Immigration in the United States and Successful German-Americans and their Descendants (New York: Fredk T. Smily Printing and Publishing Company, 1908) 110 Accessed March 12, 2024, https://books.google.com/books?id=LSEtAQAAIAAJ&pg=PA110&lpg=PA110&dq=john+eichler+morrisania+brewer&source=bl&ots=O4jJrzO7Lc&sig=ACfU3U39cZloryUc8HH8961t7oqPWHSqeQ&hl=en&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwinm5mJxojlAhVEw1kKHc3wBAMQ6AEwEHoECAgQAQ#v=onepage&q=john%20eichler%20morrisania%20brewer&f=false.

[11] Frederick W. Beers, op. cit.

[12] Georg von Skal, op. cit. 110, 115.

[13] Joel Schwartz, op. cit. 62.

[14] Ibid. 89.

[15] Frederick W. Beers , op. cit.

[16] Accessed February 14, 2024  https://collections.mcny.org/CS.aspx?VP3=SearchResult&VBID=24UAYWD06H0YN.