St. Andrew's Episcopal Church ca. 1912

St. Andrew's, the first Protestant Episcopal congregation in Harlem, was organized in 1829 and opened its first church on Fourth (now Park) Avenue between 127th and 128th Streets the following year. Several additions enlarged the church before fire destroyed it in 1871. The next year, the congregation broke ground on the same site for a new church designed by Henry M. Congdon (1834-1922). The Gothic-style building was completed in 1873.

St. Andrew's grew along with Nieuw Haarlem, a village established in 1658 by Peter Stuyvesant and bounded by the Harlem River, Morningside heights, 110th Street, and 155th Street. Because of the congregation's steady growth and the noise and smoke of the railroad along Park Avenue, a larger building on a different site was deemed necessary for St. Andrew's. In 1888, the building firm of Mahoney and Watson was hired to dismantle the church, brick by brick, and to reassemble and enlarge it on its present site, the east side of Fifth Avenue between 127th and 128th Streets. The larger building, shown here, accommodated congregants from the "aristocratic apartment houses and the popular brownstones'" of the neighborhood, populated primary by Germans and Irish and graced by such amenities as Oscar Hammerstein's Harlem Opera House on West 125th Street.