General Theological Seminary ca. 1941 The West Building of the General Theological Seminary was one of an identical pair, the East building having been razed many years ago. It is one of the earliest Gothic Revival buildings in the city and displays a rather naive application of Gothic ornament. Although it is an early forerunner of the countless ivy-clad campuses of the nineteen-twenties, it is, through it simplicity, closer to many of them than were the later, more elaborate Gothic buildings of the eighteen-sixties.

Created by William White, Theodore Dehon, John Henry Hobart, the General Theological Seminary, founded in 1817, is the oldest Episcopal seminary in the United States. Classes began originally at St. Paul's Chapel before briefly moving to New Haven. Clement Clarke Moore, its first professor of biblical languages, donated the land that by 1827 the Seminary occupied. While it was the center of the Oxford Movement, which called for a return to High Anglican Traditions, the seminary began a new age of expansion in the late 19th century. Receiving permission to grant degrees in 1869, the Seminary expanded it physical campus and class size greatly under the leadership of Augustus Hoffman, a benefactor as well as a dean of the seminary. In 1972, the General Theological Seminary was the first American Episcopal Seminary to issue a statement supporting the ordination of women (who were first admitted as full time students in 1971.) The Seminary operates to this day and offers a multitude of religious instruction besides its three year master of divinity program.

In 1750, British naval officer Thomas Clarke bought a Dutch farm to create his retirement estate, named “Chelsea” after the Royal Hospital Chelsea in London. His property extended from approximately Eighth Avenue to the Hudson—its shore ran roughly along today’s Tenth Avenue—between 20th and 28th Streets. The estate was subdivided in 1813 between two grandsons; Clement Clarke Moore received the southern half below 24th Street while his cousin, Thomas B. Clarke, inherited the northern section. The two halves developed distinctly different characters due to the split. Today, Chelsea contains a variety of historic architecture, including some of the city’s most intact nineteenth-century residential blocks, significant commercial buildings, and industrial complexes near the Hudson River.

(1827 and 1836; 1883-1902, Charles Coolidge Haight) The Seminary stands on land donated by Clement Clarke Moore, and originally included just the 1827 East Building, since demolished, and the matching 1836 West Building, which remains. Moore hoped the open campus would double as a value-enhancing town square, like Washington Square and Gramercy Park; it was in fact long called “Chelsea Square.” A seminary graduate, Eugene Augustus Hoffman, was installed as the first dean in 1879. Backed by his personal wealth, he began an ambitious building program known as the “Grand Design.” His architect Haight took inspiration from the Collegiate Gothic campuses of England and their quadrangles as well as the image of a medieval cloister. He built along three sides of the Seminary block’s perimeter, shielding its grounds from Ninth and Tenth Avenues and 21st Street, and preserving much of Moore’s original public-square intent. Left open on the south, Haight’s plan admitted sunlight and allowed the front gardens of the rowhouses across 20th Street—planned via a ten-foot setback laid out by Clement Clark Moore—to contribute their greenery to the leafy oasis of the Seminary. Haight’s design and the rowhouses opposite create a modern, urban version of an encircling cloister. The Seminary’s central, south-facing chapel occupies the traditional place of a medieval cloister church. Its bell tower, like St. Peter’s Church, is modeled on Magdalen Tower at Oxford. Despite unfortunate encroachments on the Seminary’s open space by luxury apartment construction, the block remains uniquely gracious and the heart of Chelsea.