BY WALTER ELLIOTT
(NLT) Deut. 32:7: Remember the days of old; consider the years of many generations; ask your father and he will show you; your elders, they will tell you.
EAST ORANGE – Brick Presbyterian Church here at 552 Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Blvd./ 7 Prospect St. – which was here before there was an East Orange, the Morris & Essex Railroad and even its namesake neighborhood – is being demolished.
Joe Maggio Construction, of Wantage, first appeared at the northwest corner of MLK and Prospect with two excavators and a dump truck before 7 a.m. March 20. They were acting on behalf of new owner Seven Prospect Street LLC, of New Hyde Park, N.Y. with presumably a city-issued demolition permit.
The excavators pulled down “Brick Pres'” rear chapel, carriage house and Sunday school room by the end of that Monday. Two contracted cranes were brought in to tear down its steeple March 20.
Maggio had help. The East Orange Police Department had closed Prospect, both ways between King Boulevard and William Street, detouring NJTransit’s No. 94 route buses. The street was used to park a dump truck to start hauling away debris and a PSE&G work truck to help with underground utility work that day.
Westbound King traffic was partially restricted or periodically detoured between Halstead/Lincoln streets and Harrison/South Harrison streets in part to help with crane movement. The bell tower’s spire, down to its brick masonry, was no longer visible to NJTransit Morris & Essex riders while stopping at or passing through its Brick Church Station March 22.
Only an overnight and daylong rain shower March 22-23 and the Sunday sabbath March 24 had delayed Maggio from turning East Orange’s first church and the last of the neighborhood’s brick churches into a pile of red brick rubble on or around Easter Monday April 1.
Maggio was actually completing a job that had been started by someone else on April 7.
A contractor for then-owner New Brick Church LLC., of Brooklyn, began to take down the chapel’s rear half before the city, who had issued that demo permit, issued a stop work order.
That stop work order became binding April 25 by N.J. Superior Court Judge Lisa Adubato until the .51 acre property’s ownership was settled. It gave the opportunity for the church’s last occupant, the Temple of United Christians, to attempt buying the church back.
The Temple of United Christians Brick Church, after 14 years of maintenance woes and potential mortgage default drama, sold the building to New Brick Church for $460,000 Sept. 24, 2020 and moved to 320 Springdale Ave.
NBC, before presenting a site application plan before the East Orange Zoning Board of Adjustment in 2021, put a $600,000 mortgage loan on the property. It presented a renovated front half of BPC mated to a seven story modern back half for 75 residential units.
The zoning board, however, turned down that plan. The proposal did not have street level commercial/retail space, which is a requirement for the Brick Church Central Business District. Board members were also skeptical about the proposal calling for renting out nearby lots for satellite parking.
Instead of coming up with a Plan B, NBC sold the property to Seven Prospect Street LLC for $2.7 million May 11. Seven Prospect, according to a city zoning official, has not filed a site plan application. “Local Talk” has filed an OPRA request for the presumably pre-March 15-issued demolition permit.
The last four years’ events revealed that East Orange is one of the few municipalities that do not have an historic preservation commission.
When the demolishers get to the church’s basement, it will expose it to the elements for the first time since April 21, 1831. That was when congregants of the “Second Presbyterian Church of Orange” held their first worship service.
Both the First Presbyterian Church of Orange and the Presbytery of Newark granted worshipping residents of this neighborhood their permission to form “SPCO.” The mother Presbyterian church of the Oranges, formed in 1720, was getting crowded. Locals got tired of making the 1.2 mile round trip to “First Pres’ ” sanctuary at Main and Cone/North Day streets.
SPCO meanwhile grew with the neighborhood to where it could afford the expanded 1878 Romanesque red brick structure that most have seen – but not for long.
The Depression of 1837 caused one of the Condit family to sell his surrounding 110 acres to New York City real estate agent Matthias Halsted. Halsted began building houses and attracting buyers by having them take the M&E Railroad, which started making stops here Nov. 19, 1836.
Home buyer volume at the whistle stop grew to where the M&E and Halsted made a deal in 1864: Halsted built a depot at his expense in exchange for the railroad stopping all of its express and local trains at “Brick Church Station.” That practice continued until NJTransit acquired the line in 1982.
The sanctuary and the newly-coined Brick Church neighborhood, in 1864, found itself in East Orange. It and what became West and South Orange spun themselves off from Orange 1861-64. The congregants kept calling themselves “SPCO” until 1893, when the then-new Munn Avenue Presbyterian Church started calling themselves the “First Presbyterian Church of East Orange.”
BPC was not the only brick church in the neighborhood 1893-1970.
Trinity Congregational Church constructed a terra cotta brick building near the southeast corner of South Harrison and Brick Church Plaza. It stood until it and some 24 other structures were leveled for the first ShopRite-anchored Brick Church Shopping Plaza by 1974.
Officials from BPC talked with members of Trinity and Central Presbyterian Church of Orange about merging with one or the other in 1929.
The New Jersey Historical Sites Preservation Office, in its Fall 1980 inventory of East Orange, noted:
“The Brick Presbyterian Church is one of the earliest-founded churches in East Orange. Its role as a physical landmark within and outside the city, as a social and religious center for a large segment of that city’s population and its influence in the development of the Main Street commercial district, make this structure probably the singular most important building in the city. Following the tradition of Presbyterian communities congregating around the church, Brick Church was early on the nucleus of the East Orange community. It became famous even on a national level as the ‘Brick Church’ landmark for the Oranges as is always referred to in guidebooks to the Oranges.”
The Presbytery of Newark, now Presbytery of North East N.J., however, had put 552 King Blvd. on the real estate market by 2003. BPC’s remaining congregants were absorbed by Bethel Presbyterian in the city’s Franklin/Doddtown section and other nearby churches.
It is not clear whether the Presbytery had directly sold 552 King to TUCBC or through a third party. Its last public occasion was when First Lady Tammy Murphy awarded Rev. Jean Maurice and his congregation a check to assist COVID-affected locals.
Whatever proposal is made for BPC’s lot will be independent of The Crossings at Brick Church project across the boulevard. One wonders whether residents who will move in around 2025 or 26 will look out their windows and ask, “Where’s the Brick Church?”
Residents and visitors, a couple of generations hence, may start thinking that “Brick Church” is some name that a realtor had dreamed up.
