Monumental Romanesque Church is now Home of Ecumenical Theological Seminary

First Presbyterian Church, Detroit Michigan

Date added: December 15, 2024

Looking east at the corner of Woodward Avenue and Edmund Place (1900)

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First Presbyterian Church was the home of the oldest Protestant congregation in Detroit. It is one of the city's most outstanding Romanesque Revival ecclesiastical buildings, as well as an example of the finest work of an important local architect.

The congregation of First Presbyterian Church traces its origins to 1816 when its forerunner, the First Evangelical Society of Detroit, was formed as the first Protestant congregation in Detroit. Up to this time, the overwhelmingly Roman Catholic population of the city had been served by the century-old French Catholic parish of Ste. Anne. In the early 1800s significant numbers of Americans from New York State and New England began to settle in Detroit. At first, only occasional visiting Protestant ministers and the local Catholic clergy were available to serve the spiritual needs of the newcomers.

Beginning in 1816, when a permanent minister was secured, the Protestants held regular services in the town hall. The early services were conducted in accordance with Presbyterian practices, but the creed was written with sufficient latitude that Protestants of any denomination could be members.

In 1825, the congregation, by then known as the first Protestant Society of Detroit, was given the lot on Woodward Avenue between Larned and Congress streets where the approximately thirty members had met in a modest wooden chapel since 1820. Shortly afterward, the church re-organized as a Presbyterian congregation, the first in Michigan, and adopted the name of First Presbyterian Church, although it has remained incorporated down to the present under the old name of the First Protestant Society of Detroit.

A new brick church was built in 1834 to serve the growing congregation. In 1854 this church burned, and the members decided to locate further uptown at the corner of Gratiot and Farmer streets. The new brick church (demolished) seated about seven-hundred members.

Detroit experienced a boom period after the Civil War and slowly the residential area around the new church became a commercial zone. By the 1880s, the congregation was looking further uptown to the elegant Woodward Avenue corridor for a new home. In 1889, the site at Woodward and Edmund Place was acquired and construction began on the present structure.

Since its completion in May of 1891, the building was in continuous use by the congregation until 1990. In 1910 the church was able to acquire an adjoining dwelling for use as a parsonage and some additional land for the construction of a church house. The parsonage has been Demolished, but the church-house, completed in 1911, is still in use for educational purposes and social activities.

In 1935, the widening of Woodward Avenue, one of Detroit's principal thoroughfares, necessitated a major rebuilding of the church. The facade facing Woodward Avenue was disassembled and partially reconstructed on Edmund Place to a new design so sympathetic to the 1891 scheme that it is difficult to imagine today that the church was not originally built this way. The transept facing Woodward Avenue was shortened and given a new elevation treatment in the Romanesque Revival style re-using materials from the old facade, This remarkable rebuilding was only possible because George D. Mason, the 1889 architect of the building, was still practicing and was hired by the congregation to rework his original design.

Beginning in the 1930s the congregation began to decline in numbers. Throughout the 1950s, and 1960s when the massive middle class migration out of the inner city gained momentum, First Presbyterian increasingly found itself serving a dwindling congregation of older members and families living in the suburbs. As its membership became citywide, parking lots were constructed to the north and east of the church. Meanwhile, the once-fashionable surrounding residential area declined steadily into a seedy rooming house district and, eventually, a blighted slum. In 1990, this church merged with Westminister Presbyterian located at the intersection of Hubbell Street and West Outer Drive in Northwest Detroit. The Ecumenical Theological Seminary was founded in Detroit in 1990. Two years later they rented First Presbyterian Church to serve as their home campus. Ten years later, the Presbyterians gave this distinctive church, designed more than century earlier, to that seminary.

First Presbyterian is one of the finest designs of George DeWitt Mason (1856-1948) one of Detroit's most accomplished architects. Mason received the commission to design First Presbyterian Church in 1889 when the congregation was planning to move uptown from the Farmer and Gratiot location in the business district where it had been since 1854. Mason, who was then associated with Zacharias Rice, and later with Albert Kahn, was already an established architect with a large practice. Like most nineteenth-century architects, Mason was a versatile and eclectic designer who undertook commissions for all types of buildings. He began practicing in the 1870s designing churches, commercial buildings, and houses for Detroit's burgeoning merchant community. Within a few years, in association with Zacharias Rice, he was executing projects throughout the state. Among the other structures designed by this firm are the Grand Hotel (1887), Mackinac Island; several buildings (1900-1910) in the University of Michigan Central Campus, Ann Arbor; several early twentieth-century houses in Indian Village, Detroit; the Police Headquarters Buildings (1893), Belle Isle, Detroit; and the Thompson Home for Old Ladies (1884), Detroit. The wide variety of architectural styles represented by this list is incomplete without First Presbyterian, which is the most skillful Romanesque Revival church design ever authored by Mason and one of the finest buildings in Detroit. George Mason's long association with the building from 1889 when he conceived the design until 1935-36 when he recast the exterior of the church is a remarkable achievement.

Building Description

The First Presbyterian Church is located on the northeast corner of Woodward Avenue and Edmund Place just north of downtown Detroit. When it was built, First Presbyterian was located well back from fashionable Woodward Avenue in a quiet, tree-shaded, upper-class, late Victorian, residential area surrounded by spacious, single-family houses. The neighborhood has changed so thoroughly in the last thirty years that the church is now situated at the edge of the sidewalk on a wide, barren, heavily-traveled thoroughfare adjoined by multi-story, twentieth-century, commercial structures and blighted, slum dwellings.

It is a cruciform structure with a massive, 48-foot square, 193-foot tall central tower rising a story-and-a-half above the short transepts. The spaces between the arms of the cross are filled with low, rectangular projections while the steeply-pitched, hip-roofed tower is buttressed at the corners with round, conically-roofed turrets.

The building is a superb example of the Romanesque Revival style. It is executed entirely in rock-faced, red sandstone ashler with many tall, narrow, arched windows. On the Woodward Avenue elevation is a fine, large, ocular, "rose" window divided into seven, smaller, round, stained-glass lights with scalloped edges, while the entrance front on Edmund Place is composed of an elaborate, arcaded, polychrome, stone-mosaic, tripartite, portal abutted by a conically roofed, round tower on the east and surmounted by a tripartite, Palladian-type, arched, stained-glass window. The central tower is pierced at the top by a continuous band of oversized, arched, stained-glass windows with a gabled, Palladian-motif, central window on each side. The complex massing, the great variety of fenestration, the superb detailing and the carved enrichments enliven the otherwise rather severe elevations.

The most elaborate feature of the exterior is the intricate main entrance on Edmund Place. The three, double door entrances are inset beneath a series of receding arches enriched with carved moldings and springing from engaged colonnettes. The massive, diagonally-boarded, arched doors are mounted with large, scrolled, wrought-iron hinges and ring pulls with lions-head escutcheons. The polychrome, granite, mosaic work surmounting the arched doorways is enframed in Romanesque, foliated, strap-work. The multi-colored, stone, mosaic blocks are laid in chevron, star, and pinwheel motifs on a checkered ground.

Adjoining the Edmund Place elevation on the east is the end-gabled chapel. This structure was part of the original construction and continues the design and detailing of the main church. It has large arched windows and a massive, gabled porch with Romanesque columns.

The interiors of the church have been changed very little since the 1930s. The short, vaulted, south, east, and west transepts contain pew seating and balconies arranged in a semi-circle around the soaring central crossing focusing on the north transept, which contains the pulpit. The original 1890 pipe organ in the loft behind the pulpit was redesigned in 1935 to provide choir space. The dark oak woodwork in the north, sanctuary transept mostly dates from a 1935 remodeling, but is in the same Romanesque style as the original wood trim. The curved oak pews and the large brass central chandelier (originally fitted for both gas and electricity) are still in use.

The somber interior is enlivened by the many colorful stained-glass windows in the transepts and the tower. The finest is the large central window in the south transept which was executed by Tiffany Studios and depicts St. John of Patmos. In addition, most of the original stenciling and oil painting survives. Rich bands of painted fretwork border the ceilings, the arches, and the fenestration. Many of these intricate stenciling are edged by gilded moldings. The soffits of the arches are also paneled and stenciled. Centered over the arches supporting the tower are portrait medallions of the four Evangelists flanked by ecclesiastical symbols and iconographical motifs. The domed and vaulted ceiling of the tower is painted blue to complement the continuous band of mostly blue stained-glass clerestory windows.

The chapel, adjoining on the east, was originally similar in plan and decoration to the main church in that it has seating and balconies on the north, east, and south sides. It was intended to seat about 800, only half the capacity of the main church. In addition to arched-top, stained-glass windows, there is a fine central chandelier. The balconies have been enclosed for offices and classrooms and the nave converted to use as a social hall.

The church was originally closely abutted on all sides by spacious houses. This prevented the addition of needed church facilities for almost twenty years and made it necessary to engineer some makeshift space arrangements within the church that were not entirely adequate for the needs of the growing congregation. The pastor's study, for example, was tucked away beneath the organ loft behind the sanctuary.

Finally, in 1910, the congregation was able to purchase an adjoining house on Edmund Place for use as a parsonage (demolished) as well as some additional land behind the church for the construction of a church house. This new building was erected in 1910-1911 to provide meeting rooms, a kitchen, dining room, recreational space, and offices. It is a brick, 3-story-on-high-basement, low-hip-roofed structure with banded brickwork, arcaded fenestration on the second story, and a paneled brick frieze at the widely overhanging eaves. This free-standing building, which is reminiscent of the simple, functional, public school architecture of the period, is joined to the church by a long, brick passageway leading to a door in the east wall of the chapel. A set of double doors mounted with scrolled wrought-iron hinges and sheltered by a gabled wooden hood at the end of the passage provides access to the church house from Edmund Place.

Another entrance was added in 1953, along with an office, on the west side of this passage to provide access from Woodward Avenue and the church's northern parking lots. This doorway was given a monumental treatment with simplified Romanesque detailing, including engaged columns with Maltese crosses carved on the capitols. It was designed by the distinguished architect William Kapp who also executed such notable structures as Meadowbrook Hall, (1929) Rochester, Michigan.

There have been few important alterations made to the church since 1935 when the principal elevations were redesigned. The removal of the terra cotta cresting and the enclosure of the open turrets on the west side of the tower are the more noticeable exterior changes. Asphalt shingles have been installed on the transept roofs although, the central tower, the turrets, and the chapel are still roofed in slate.