(compelling music) - Across time, across civilization, from Asia to the Americas, the best architecture over, and over, and over again is architecture devoted to something spiritual.

Call it religion, call it whatever you want to call it, but it's something bigger than the self, bigger than a person, bigger than even a particular culture.

- Architecture really arose out of creating places for the spirit.

You think of the oldest structures on earth, and there are sacred places, this sort of spiritual dimension, and it's something that everybody longs for in one way or the other.

And I think people find solace, they find connection, and they find direction by being in sacred space.

(compelling music) - Ours is a nation of immigrants.

We're a tapestry of endless hues of diverse peoples from all over the planet who have come here often fleeing the floods of prejudice and persecution.

Every seventh person in America was born in another country, and just about every country in the world is represented in our population.

Immigrants coming to the United States bring with them their religion, their languages, their traditions, their cultures, and their sacred architecture.

We're a Noah's Ark of religious freedom and vernaculars.

(mellow music) In the Washington D.C. area alone, there are 170 different ethnic and national groups, and close to 40 of its over 800 places of worship are on the National Register of Historic Places.

I am Ori Z. Soltes, your host, and together, we will explore Washington, D.C. through its ecclesiastical architecture and see how the city was formed and populated and how it has evolved over the last some 200 years.

But why religious architecture?

(uplifting music) Because religious edifices are key historical markers of the communities that built them.

(uplifting music) Because immigration to America was, in great part, a product of the religious wars that had torn Europe apart for a century and a half, beginning around 1550 with the Counter-Reformation, as Western Christians split into Protestants and Catholics, who fought, harassed, and massacred each other in the name of their particularized understanding of God.

(uplifting music) It was the quest for religious freedom that drove many of the early settlers to seek a new home in the new world.

(lively music) The Washington region was part of the original 13 colonies settled by the English.

And to this day, Washington retains important parts of its English character.

(triumphant music) After Henry VIII left the Catholic church in the early 1530s, the English were led by a Protestant, specifically Anglican church, for the most part.

Protestant King Charles I married to the French Catholic princess, Henrietta Maria, was sympathetic to Catholics, and in 1632, he gave a charter to Cecil Calvert, Second Lord Baltimore, to establish Maryland named after his wife, Mary, Maria, as a refuge for English Catholics within the largely Protestant English colonies.

(uplifting music) Settlers arrived two years later in 1634 and began to settle in Maryland.

Civil war in England led to the execution of King Charles I in 1649.

Complex religious power struggles extended across the Atlantic to Maryland and Virginia.

(suspenseful music) The Puritans took charge after revolt here in 1650 and actually outlawed both Anglicanism and Catholicism.

There's some irony in this, given that wealthy Catholics helped provide the land that would eventually become Washington, D.C. and were significant players in the building of the city.

(somber music) Meanwhile, many English aristocrats, primarily Anglicans, migrated to Virginia.

A new port, Alexandria, was eventually established by about 1749 to export tobacco and to import slaves.

(compelling music) By about 1773, a place of worship had been constructed in the Georgian-style popular in England at that time.

Christ Church was attended by George Washington and is now a historical landmark.

Georgetown was founded in 1751, just a few years later, and was also primarily a tobacco and slave port.

(uplifting music) Catholics were not permitted to build churches until Independence.

(uplifting music) At that time, the First Amendment, passed in December of 1791, asserted that Congress shall make no law respecting the establishment of, or the prohibition of, any form of religion.

It echoed an edict of tolerance passed by Maryland's Catholic leaders 140 years earlier.

However, individual states retained the right to fully exercise the principle, or not.

In Maryland, it did not apply to non-Christians.

Jews could not vote in Maryland until 1826, 50 years after independence.

(classical music) The Jesuits established Holy Trinity Church in Georgetown in 1794, the first Catholic church in the area.

(classical music) (compelling music) Not long after the American Revolution, in 1790, Congress passed the Residence Act, which provided to George Washington both the right and the responsibility for selecting the placement of a new capital.

The brand-new government had first met in Philadelphia and then New York City, but it came to be felt necessary to have a capital that would be more central to the New Republic.

Washington, D.C. was laid out in the area where the Potomac and Anacostia Rivers came together.

(ambient music) The latter is named for the Anacostans, one of the Native American tribes that inhabited this area several millennia before Europeans and enslaved Africans arrived on these shores.

In time, conflict with European colonizers pushed them away, and their villages were replaced by tobacco plantations.

(ambient music) In 1791, the Frenchman Pierre L'Enfant was brought in to actually shape and design the city.

But it was not until 1800 that Congress held its first session in what was then being called Federal City.

(compelling music) Shortly thereafter, the city was renamed in honor of George Washington, who had died the previous year.

Added to the word Washington, of course, the words District of Columbia, named for the allegorical female that was understood to represent the New Republic, but also a kind of tribute to Christopher Columbus.

(gentle music) There was also emerging a sense for this dreamed-of city, that it would be a new secular Jerusalem and also a kind of new Roman Republic.

(pensive music) So we combined our sense of Greek and Roman democratic ideals in Greco-Roman or Neoclassical style.

Holy Trinity Church in Georgetown, that we just saw, was rebuilt in this Neoclassical style as the congregation grew.

(pensive music) And if, for a moment, we fast forward to the 20th century, we realize this was the church that was frequently attended in the 1960s by John Fitzgerald Kennedy, our first Catholic president.

It's also attended by President Joseph Biden.

- The first styles that were considered American and faithful to America were Roman architecture because we saw ourselves, the country saw itself, as inheritors of the idea of Roman Republics.

By the late 1820s, early 1830s, there is a political struggle going on in Greece.

They want their independence.

And the Americans saw that as a similar conflict to what we had gone through in our own revolution.

So to show solidarity with the Greeks, a style became very popular in the United States called Greek Revival.

- [Ori] Ancient Greek temples were surrounded by columns, surmounted by a triangular pediment, usually covered with relief carvings in the front and in the back.

(lighthearted music) The Romans elevated the temple onto a pedestal and emphasized the front as a porch for their temples.

(lighthearted music) This became the preferred style for both religious and secular buildings across Washington.

The city began to expand, particularly after it was burned by the British in the War of 1812, after which a new city needed to be built, a new capital, a new home for the president.

It was a city waiting to become architecturally significant.

(somber music) - But the expertise wasn't here, the labor wasn't here.

The Irish were a big group that were available, and many of them came here to build the big buildings of the city.

The White House, for example, was built in a good part by Irish laborers.

- [Ori] St. Patrick's Church was first built in 1794, at the same time that the first Holy Trinity Church was built.

Built St. Patrick's Was by the Dominican Irish priest, Father Anthony Caffry, specifically to provide a place of worship for the incoming population of stone masons from Ireland who were building the White House and the new Capitol building.

- [Father Caffry] The increasing congregation of this city poses a great need for a place of worship to hold out a great encouragement for immigration from the old world.

St. Patrick's Church would make the town exceedingly pleasing and familiar to a great number of my countrymen and persuasion.

(gentle music) - [Ori] This church was a modest structure on F Street Northwest.

The church was rebuilt in 1884 as the congregation grew, and it was soon attended by landed gentry and not only by laborers.

(gentle music) The present edifice is in the Gothic Revival style, with its sandstone-trimmed ogive arches and its beautiful swatches of stained glass windows that include scenes from the life of St. Patrick and greatly resembles the many greystone churches that are commonly seen across the Irish landscape, particularly rural but also urban.

(gentle music) A generation after the first St. Patrick's Church was built, a religious structure that remains to this day, right across from the White House, near Lafayette Square, was built in 1816.

St. John's Episcopal Church, designed by Benjamin Latrobe.

(compelling music) - [Michael] And it's known as the Church of the Presidents, and almost all presidents have worshiped there.

It's been in the center of things for almost the entire existence of the city.

(lively music) - Earlier, in 1765, a German immigrant by the name of Jacob Funk, or Jacob Funk, bought up 130 acres in today's Foggy Bottom, just south of Georgetown.

He wished to create a new town called Hamburg or Funk Town, for Germans to live in in this otherwise English enclave.

(lively music) After William Penn had toured German-speaking areas of Europe back in the 1670s speaking about religious freedom in America, German speakers had begun coming here in increasing numbers.

By 1832, the German community that one might call the descendant community of the once-upon-a-time Hamburg or Funk Town, established itself in a new structure, the Concordia Church.

By the mid-19th century, about 1/3 of the population of the colonies were of German descent.

(lively music) The German population would grow to be the largest national ancestral group in the United States.

Its growth in the nation's capital required a complete rebuilding of the church in 1891.

The German-born architect Paul Schultz designed it following the Hanover School of Architecture's style, en vogue at that time, with its stepped gables, and its rounded windows, and unvarnished brick exterior.

Up to the present moment, services are sometimes offered in German.

So we encounter an expression of that impetus to preserve one's native tongue, the key to ethnicity and culture.

(jaunty music) Other Germans, besides Lutherans and Catholics, came here in the 19th century.

Jews first arrived to these shores in 1654, more than a century before it was the United States of America.

But when Washington, D.C. became our capital, Jews were as attracted to the city as others were.

By the middle of the 19th century, a critical mass of Jews arrived, mostly from German-speaking parts of Central Europe.

The first congregation, Washington Hebrew Congregation, was established in 1852, the only Jewish place of worship founded by congressional charter.

Washington Hebrew itself was reformed because so many of the German Jews were reformed Jews.

Reform, with its more limited liturgy and shorter services in the vernacular, attracted more and more people.

But the reformed synagogue soon had dissenters because it wasn't traditional enough.

So by the end of the 1860s, a pull-away congregation from the original Washington Hebrew was established.

It called itself Adas Israel, Adath Yisroel, the Community of Israel.

And by 1876, Adas Israel had built its first synagogue building, a charming, small, two-story high brick building.

And at the dedication, the President, Ulysses S. Grant, was present.

(lively music) In 1897, the Washington Hebrew Congregation built a new synagogue, and President McKinley attended the cornerstone laying ceremony.

Adas Israel, that is to this day, the largest of the conservative denomination Jewish congregations in the Washington, D.C. area, expanded sufficiently so that by 1908, they needed to move into new accommodations at the corner of Sixth & I Streets Northwest.

And so a majestic new structure was built, with Gothic elements like its large stained-glass windows, and the kind of dome that one associates with Byzantine and Islamic architecture.

It's a kind of amalgam, and it became the new home of the congregation.

(pensive music) It continued to grow.

(pensive music) By the end of the 19th century, 2.8 million Jewish immigrants had arrived in the United States, but mainly from Eastern Europe.

Sheldon Zuckerman, a child of such immigrants, notes that... - My father's family came from a little town on the Polish-Russian border.

There was a pogrom in a village near theirs and they killed three Jews.

And my grandmother said, "If they killed them, they'll kill us, we're out of here."

They came into Baltimore because that's where you could get the least expensive boat fare, because Baltimore was where they exported all the Virginia tobacco and the ships didn't have anything to bring back, so they would bring people back.

- His family ended up in Washington, D.C. Later, the Adas Israel congregation relocated out of the center of the city, and the Sixth & I Synagogue became the home of the Turner Memorial AME Church in the late 1940s.

(mellow music) ♪ Alleluia ♪ - [Ori] The African American congregation that inhabited Adas Israel for six decades was part of another sizable population that expanded in the D.C. area by the mid-19th century.

In 1619, the first ship carrying Africans as slaves arrived in Jamestown, Virginia.

(somber music) By 1833, slavery was outlawed throughout the British Empire, but in the independent United States, it took the Civil War for the institution of slavery to come to an end.

(singer vocalizing) Before the Civil War and Emancipation, more than 90% of American Blacks lived in the South.

After the Civil War, thousands of former slaves migrated to Washington, D.C., more than doubling the African American population of the capital.

In Georgetown, African Americans had long been worshiping together with whites, but they were most often relegated to the back rows.

♪ Alleluia ♪ - [Ori] White ministers sometimes refused to hold Black babies when they were performing baptisms, so that Rock Creek was often used by African Americans instead of an in-church baptismal font.

♪ Alleluia ♪ - [Ori] In the early 19th century, groups of African Americans began to split off from white churches.

♪ Alleluia ♪ - [Ori] In 1814, 125 members came together to form their own congregation, the oldest in D.C., and this eventually became the basis for the Mount Zion United Methodist Church, the current structure built in 1884 or so.

♪ Alleluia ♪ - [Ori] Although most African Americans were driven out of Georgetown eventually because of rising real estate prices and gentrification, interestingly, many continued to commute back to the four Black churches that emerged within this early settlement.

- [Interviewee] Church was the main place for Black people, I would say.

There wasn't any distinction in the church because that was really our seat of activity.

So no matter what... To me, no matter what stage in life you were, when you come to the church on Sunday, everybody felt they were equal to each other.

(choir vocalizing) - Our foreparents slaved and worked to... Something that your foreparents have slaved for, worked for, why should we give it up?

It's a heritage for my children and my children's children.

- [Ori] African American churches became important promoters of education and have also been actively involved in social activities, especially in providing affordable housing as the community continued to grow.

(uplifting music) By 1860, just before the Civil War, there were nearly a dozen Black churches attended by as many as 3,800 African Americans in the D.C. area.

(pensive music) In the following decade, the number of Black residents more than tripled until they were 1/3 of the D.C. population.

Blacks continued to arrive here from every state in the Union over the decades that followed.

St. Luke's Episcopal, designated a National Historic Landmark, is the oldest African American Episcopal congregation in D.C. Pastor Reverend Crummell's grandfather was the son of an African king and was abducted by slavers.

Crummell himself studied at Cambridge University and he was taken with and inspired by the country Gothic style of Shakespeare's church in Stratford, England.

♪ Alleluia ♪ - So he passed on the idea of that style of architecture to Calvin T.S.

Brent, D.C.'s first Black architect, who designed St. Luke's in 1876 through '79.

The Metropolitan African Methodist Episcopal Church was built in 1886.

It was one of the largest African American churches in the country at the time with the capacity for 3,000 congregants, and it was among the most prestigious.

(uplifting music) The AME Denomination had been founded back in 1794 in Philadelphia by Richard Allen.

His intention was to create a church combining elements of Methodism and Episcopalianism, as found in some white denominations but that did not treat African Americans as second-class parishioners.

The first place of worship was an abandoned blacksmith's shed, and so the logo of the AME Church combines the cross with the blacksmith's anvil.

Allen was not permitted to serve as a full-fledged minister until 1799.

And by 1816, he had organized the AME churches as fully independent of white Methodist Episcopal churches.

Frederick Douglass was a member of the Metropolitan.

His funeral was held here.

And so was a memorial service for Rosa Parks, so important to the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s.

Today, it is popularly referred to as the National Cathedral of African Methodism.

(choir vocalizing) Since their ancestors had been forcibly torn from Africa, African Americans had lost contact with their homelands and therefore had no distinctive homeland style of architecture.

So, like other Protestant churches in this period, African American structures were designed in a form of the Gothic Revival style.

(choir vocalizing) But the most extraordinary example of the true Gothic style is found in the National Cathedral, which we shall visit in our next episode.

(compelling music) (compelling music continues) (compelling music continues)