When you are Brooklyn’s richest man you play by your own rules and you do not have to tolerate what ordinary people do. Thanks to Charles Pratt being offended, we have a Clinton Hill Landmark, the Emmanuel Baptist Church, one of the finest architectural legacies Pratt left in Brooklyn, but before we describe the building lets recall what angered Charles Pratt. Born in 1830 into a large, poor New England family, Charles Pratt was a self-made multi-millionaire. An oil tycoon, he started out with an independent refinery in Greenpoint, but sold out to John D. Rockefeller the baron behind Standard Oil. Rockefeller bought out Pratt who sat on the board of Standard Oil. Being a part owner in this near monoploy made Pratt fantastically rich, but thin-skinned. In his defense Pratt was a very charitable man, but he did not like it when the minister in his Baptist church wrote a satire criticizing monopolies like Standard Oil. ALong with 180 congregants, Pratt left his church and decided to build his own Baptist house of worship. He hired one of America’s greatest architects, Francis Kimabll, who also built the elegant Montauk Club I blogged about yesterday. Kimball had trained in England where he fell in love with Gothic structures, but he drew inspiration in French, not British gothic and the facade of Emmanuel Baptist Church with its two flanking bases has a lot in common with the facade of the Rheims Cathderal. There are also romanesque and later gothic elelements in the church, but Baptists are suspcious of ornamentation, so many of the statues and more ornate elements of Medieval facades are absent here. The facade is graceful yet restrained, elegant but understated. The oval central window with its inner circles captures something of the gothic spirit the building was designed to reflect. In a 1988 New York TImes article, the author claimed that it is the interior, not the exterior that is really the most impressive aspect of the structure. Christopher Gray noted:
The 900-seat interior is what is special about Emmanuel Baptist, a high, square sanctuary with a long vaulted roof over wide galleries, the whole space almost completely intact from 1887, down to the wall decorations designed by William H. Day. Two huge brownstone columns support the gallery, but otherwise the inside is an expanse of dark woodwork, stained glass and intricate wall stenciling. At the main-floor level, the walls are rust color with abstract stenciling. At the gallery level — really, the bulk of the walls on the church — the colors are olive-green with gold floral stencils, and paired figures of angels with crossed horns. Four intricate brass chandeliers drop down into the center of the space and light streaming in from three sides gives Emmanuel Baptist an airiness often lacking in urban churches.
The photos are deceiving. If you have never seen the church in person you would imagine it is a huge structure, but it is not, which adds to the unique charm of this church.