Church Center for the United Nations, New York

The Church Center for the United Nations doesn’t exactly live up to its vibrant portrayal in this 1960s postcard, but the modernist chapel on the first floor here is really neat. Located across from the United Nations complex in New York and designed by William Lescaze, the United Methodist Church intended the Church Center to be a sort of interfaith religious mission to the UN, as well as meeting and office space for ecumenical advocacy work. 

So, what’s changed? Kind of a dumb question given how stylized this postcard is, but whatever—the Church Center is basically unchanged, as is the massing of its neighbors, at least.

The Women’s Division of the United Methodist Church was the driving force behind the construction of the center. Church engagement with the UN increased drastically after the completion of their headquarters in 1952, and there wasn’t room to handle the constant flow of seminars, meetings, and visitors—the Methodist General Conference put the Women’s Division in charge of finding a suitable space. They initially explored buying two old brick buildings on the site and combining them, but that wasn’t feasible and they decided to knock them down, hiring architect William Lescaze to build them a modern new office building. 

Lescaze had been a thrilling modernist early in his career. His PSFS Building in Philadelphia, designed with George Howe, was the first International Style skyscraper in the US and decades ahead of its time, and the incredible home he designed himself in New York’s Turtle Bay has been described as New York’s first modern residence. 

The Great Depression killed the careers of so many architects, but Lescaze managed to persevere—both with Howe and on his own—but for some reason commissions dried up in the 1940s and 1950s and by the time the Methodists hired him here Lescaze’s star was pretty faded. The Church Center for the United Nations—sort of a diminished reflection of the brilliant UN Secretariat Building across the street—came as Lescaze’s career wheezed towards its end. 

Lescaze didn’t really do churches, so ecclesiastical architect Harold Eugene Wagoner—who designed them by the hundreds—designed the interior of the first floor worship space, the Chapel at the United Nations (in 1977, this is where Joe and Jill Biden married). The striking sculpture on the first floor facade, which extends to the chapel interior with its stained glass, is quite cool—titled “Man’s Search for Peace”, it’s the work of Belgian artist Benoit Gilsoul, working for Willet Stained Glass Studios.

UN Secretary General U Thant, US Ambassador to the UN Adlai Stevenson, and industrialist (and modernist architecture patron) J. Irwin Miller presided over the building’s consecration in 1963, but within a few years there were already plans to demolish it. In 1968 the State of New York passed a law creating the United Nations Development Corporation, which planned to clear a superblock between 1st and 2nd Avenues for a United Nations Development District. Ultimately, UNDC (which still exists) built One, Two, and Three UN Plaza across 44th Street from the Church Center in a greatly scaled-down version of the district. Full of office space and conference rooms, the building has hosted a wide array of religious NGOs for the last 50+ years.

Further reading:

• A Will for Peace: peace action in the United Methodist Church, a history by Herman Will
• Legacy for the Future: the history of Christian social relations in the Women's Division of Christian service, 1940-1968 by Thelma Stevens
• A Worldly Affair: New York, the United Nations, and the story behind their unlikely bond by Pamela Hanlon
• On Being an Architect by William Lescaze
• The American Architectural Legacy of William Lescaze by George Dodds

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