ST. AUGUSTINE PRESBYTERIAN CHURCH

Look across the Prospect Avenue at that big greystone hulk. That’s the old St. Augustine Presbyterian Church.

The place dates back to 1906, when the white congregation of Woodstock Presbyterian built themselves a handsome Neo-Gothic church of brick and stone. By 1938, they had packed up and merged with another congregation down on Home Street, leaving behind a magnificent building in a neighborhood that was changing around them.

Enter the Reverend Edler Garnet Hawkins, a young Black minister with considerably more on his mind than Sunday sermons. He established St. Augustine in 1938, and as Black families and Puerto Rican neighbors moved into Morrisania, the congregation flourished. By the 1950s, more than a thousand people belonged to the church, which had become a center of neighborhood politics, social organizing, and cultural life. There were classical concerts, community campaigns, and appearances by Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., who came to speak at the church. Hawkins himself became a national figure, eventually rising to become the first Black moderator of the United Presbyterian Church in 1964.

And there was music. In 1961, the church acquired an extraordinary 1931 Austin pipe organ, complete with three keyboards and an Art Deco console. It had begun its life in a Cleveland radio station, passed through Brooklyn, and finally found a home in the Bronx.

But the neighborhood kept changing, and so did the fortunes of the congregation. Membership declined, money became scarce, and maintaining a building of that size became an increasingly hopeless proposition. Eventually, the church closed, leaving behind more than a century of history.

Now look at it. The doors are chained, the pews are empty, and somewhere inside sits that magnificent old Austin organ, silent for years. The beautiful opalescent windows, once meant to catch the light of heaven, have become targets for vandals.