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Calvary Baptist Church traces back to 1847, when the congregation first organized, then built its original sanctuary at 50 West 23rd Street in 1854. By 1883 the church had outgrown that space and commissioned architect John Rochester Thomas to design the red sandstone Gothic building shown here, raised at 123 West 57th Street near what would soon become Carnegie Hall's neighborhood.
The church hit its cultural peak under pastor John Roach Straton, who led the congregation from 1918 to 1929 and turned Calvary into one of the country's loudest pulpits for fundamentalist Christianity, sparring publicly with modernists during the same era as the Scopes trial. In 1923, Calvary became one of the first churches in America to run its own radio station, a tradition that continued for decades through its long-running broadcast "Tell It From Calvary."
The building stood for nearly 140 years before developers acquired the site in 2021 and demolition began in 2022, ending an era for one of Midtown's most recognizable church spires. A Gothic silhouette that once anchored a Manhattan block now survives mostly in photographs like this one, a fitting irony for a church that spent a century broadcasting itself into people's living rooms.
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