Cuyler and the Lafayette Avenue Presbyterian Church

In 1860, Brooklyn's Park Presbyterian Church, then building a new church on Lafayette Avenue in Fort Greene invited the celebrated Pastor Theodore Richard Cuyler to be its pastor. When the church was completed in 1862, the congregation changed its name to the Lafayette Avenue Presbyterian Church. There Cuyler spent the next 30 years. In 1860, when he became pastor the congregation numbered 140 people; when he left, in 1890, it had grown to 2,330 and was the third-largest Presbyterian congregation in America. He wrote 22 books and more than 4,0000 articles. Cuyler and Henry Ward Beecher were wary friends and sometimes shared a podium. In 1872, Cuyler invited the Quaker leader Sarah Smiley to address his congregation. He was criticized by the Presbytery of Brooklyn for inviting a woman to address a mixed-sex assembly.

Cuyler's vociferous opposition to slavery is a large part of what commended him to Park Presbyterian Church, which was founded by abolitionists. "On the Sunday when fire was opened on Fort Sumter," said the Brooklyn Daily Eagle, "the American flag was raised on the steeple of the Lafayette Avenue Church and it stayed there until Lee surrendered and the confederacy collapsed." "During the Civil War riots in this city," wrote the New York Tribune, "his church, with that of Henry Ward Beecher's, was closely guarded by the authorities" Two thousand people crammed into Lafayette Presbyterian Church for Cuyler's Funeral on March 1, 1909.