More Neighborhood Photos

Here are photos of the Riverside Church at 120th and Riverside Drive and the Union Theological Seminary. Riverside Church describes itself as being similar to Chartres, but beyond its buttresses and fairly purified French Gothic lines, I don't see the resemblance. Its single tower is probably twice the height of the taller of Chartre's two towers. At some point in its history, someone made the inexplicable decision to add a seven or eight story office building to the front of the tower at what must have been the main entrance, thereby destroying the building's symmetry and most of any inspiration its soaring edifice must have evinced. Around the corner from the church, the seminary is in a warmer English Gothic style which ads a kind of serenity to an area that is fairly quiet by Manhattan standards. The neighborhood, a regular Acropolis of the Enlightenment, is also home to the Jewish Theological Seminary, The Manhattan School of Music, Columbia University, Barnard and Teachers Colleges and the massive Cathedral of St. John the Divine.