Annunciation Greek Orthodox Church of New York

History

The Annunciation Greek Orthodox Church of New York City traces its origins to 1891, when an organization called the Athena Society was established by Solon Vlastos, a prominent businessman who was also the founder of the Greek newspaper Atlantis. With roughly one thousand members dedicated to helping Greek newcomers adapt to life in the United States, the Athena Society petitioned the Ecumenical Patriarchate to send a priest to the community, and out of that petition was born what became known as Evangelismos Tis Theotokou, the Annunciation of the Theotokos. A priest arrived in late 1892 and began holding services at Washington Square, with the Judson Memorial Baptist Church on West 4th Street made available by its pastor, a known philhellene.

In the decades that followed, the congregation moved through a succession of locations across Manhattan as its membership grew and neighborhoods changed around it. By 1907 the parish had settled temporarily on Lexington Avenue between 57th and 58th Streets, then on West 23rd Street, and by 1908 at 329 West 30th Street. In 1909 the church officially incorporated as the Greek Orthodox Community, becoming the first recorded Greek community in New York. Two benefactors, John Counes and Euripides Kehagias, purchased the former Amity Baptist Church at 310 West 54th Street, a Byzantine-style building inspired by Hagia Sophia, which became a hub of Greek community life hosting thousands of parishioners at Easter services. On August 15, 1929, a merger of the Greek Orthodox Community and the Greek Eastern Orthodox Church united the parish, and the community continued to search for its permanent home as New York changed around it.

That home was found on the Upper West Side. The building at the corner of West End Avenue and West 91st Street had been designed by the architectural firm of Heins and LaFarge, architects also responsible for the original design of the Cathedral of Saint John the Divine, and built in 1893 and 1894 as the Fourth Presbyterian Church. Its Gothic Revival masonry facade, square corner bell tower with crenellated parapet and gargoyle gutter-spouts, and fine stained glass attributed either to Tiffany Studios or to John LaFarge himself gave the building a singular character on the Upper West Side. The Greek Orthodox congregation purchased the building and moved in on March 25, 1953, the Feast of the Annunciation, giving the church its name through the very date of its arrival. In 1957, an intricately carved wooden iconostasis of linden and lime wood, designed and executed in Greece by noted Byzantine woodcarver Theophanis Nomikos with inset icons painted by New York iconographer Konstantinos Youssis of the Bronx, was installed in the sanctuary. Three voluminous multi-tiered crystal chandeliers were imported from Czechoslovakia in the 1960s, and the parish's rare E.M. Skinner organ remains one of the few tonally unaltered Skinner organs in existence.

The Annunciation Greek Orthodox Church at West End Avenue and West 91st Street in Manhattan serves the Orthodox Christian faithful of the Upper West Side as a parish of the Direct Archdiocesan District of the Greek Orthodox Archdiocese of America, one of the oldest Greek Orthodox communities in the United States, worshipping in one of Manhattan's most distinguished ecclesiastical buildings.