Paul Bass Photos
The skeleton of a 165-year-old Gothic church fully emerged from a 72-year-old Art Deco cocoon Wednesday for one last wave at New Haven — before crumbling into the rubbish heap of history.
The temporarily visible structure at the corner of Elm and Orange streets is the shell of the original permanent home of St. Thomas’s Episcopal Church. The congregation built the church out of Portland Stone and prayed there for 85 years starting in 1855, before moving to its current home on Whitney Avenue.
Pictured at right is what people saw when they walked by the church on Elm Street back in the day.
The church disappeared from public in 1948, when a new owner wrapped an Art Deco building around it. The building functioned as a bank well into the 21st century. (Click here for a previous article detailing the church’s history.)
Now the building is coming down. A crew hired by Spinnaker Real Estate Partners has been demolishing the structure to make way for a new 132-room Hilton Garden Inn hotel.
The crew first removed the Art Deco building wrapped around the interior shell of the church (which had been repurposed). Gradually the side of the former church came into view along the Orange Street side of the property.
Then the crew moved to the Elm Street side to remove the bank building facade. By Wednesday the church facade behind it was in full view.
Spinnaker Director of Development Frank Caico told the Independent Wednesday that the most recent work has not turned up any new discoveries. He said the crew “hopefully will have the remainder of the building down in a couple of weeks.” In the meantime, New Haveners will have one last fleeting taste of a ghost from a century past.
Contributed photo
Former bank lobby.
As a retired city firefighter I can only imagine the problems we would have had if a fire had ever occurred in the bank and spread. Backdraft a real possibility.