Religion: HQ for Protestants

A large segment of U.S. Protestantism is on the move this week—into a 19-story, $20 million Interchurch Center overlooking the Hudson River on Manhattan’s culture-studded Morningside Heights.

Urged on by the National Council of Churches, the center has been two years abuilding on 32,000 sq. ft. of land made available by the Rockefellers. The National Council is pulling itself together from eight different locations in Manhattan to occupy four floors. Other large-scale tenants: the United Presbyterian Church in the U.S.A. (more than three floors), the Methodist Church (three floors), the Reformed Church in America, and the American Baptist Convention (one floor each). The Protestant Episcopal Church is planning to put up its own office building elsewhere in the city.

Tenants will be able to say grace in a 400-seat cafeteria, park their cars underground, and reach Riverside Church and Union Theological Seminary by connecting passages. Says Dr. Roy G. Ross, General Secretary of the National Council of Churches: “It is the prayer of all who worked toward its creation that this will become more than a symbol of the growing spiritual unity of Protestant and Eastern Orthodox Churches in America.”