Pilgrim United Church of Christ

Courtesy of NYC Department of Taxation and Finance/1940s.nyc

There's a rule of thumb for city explorers: when a discovery seems too easy, it probably is. I was prowling the block, the sun beating down on the pavement, when I saw it. An entrance, tucked away beneath the shadowy tangle of sidewalk scaffolding, a side door was wide open. It was an invitation wrapped in a warning.

The air was thick enough to swim through, that specific, suffocating brand of a New York City summer heatwave. I needed a moment, a prop. I ducked into the corner bodega, the bell on the door announcing my brief escape into the chilled air. Minutes later, I was back on the street with a cold can of AriZona Mucho Mango Juice Cocktail, its condensation a welcome relief against my palm. Standing nonchalantly on the sidewalk across the street, I took a long sip and began my watch. I wasn't just waiting for the right time; I was studying the rhythm of the street, waiting for a gap in the steady flow of people.

When the river of pedestrians thinned to a trickle, I made my move. It was a clumsy effort as I made my way up the debris-strewn stairs and the fallen door, a hurried glance over my shoulder to confirm my anonymity, and a less-than-graceful entrance. I was in. I scanned for another door but found no entry to the main sanctuary, my heart sinking when I noticed a long church pew. Then I saw it. Someone had dragged a heavy wooden pew from inside and wedged it against the inner door, a makeshift barricade. After a moment of straining, I slid the pew aside and stepped through the opening.

The air inside was cool, still, and smelled of dust and forgotten prayers. As my eyes adjusted, they widened. Above me, a magnificent circular dome ceiling, painted a brilliant, celestial blue, soared toward the heavens. It was a breathtaking sight, a sliver of perfection watching over a scene of quiet devastation. The pews below were arranged in a spectacular sweep, just as they would have been on any given Sunday, only now they were coated in a fine layer of grime.

My gaze fell upon the heart of the sanctuary, the grand pipe organ. It was a wreck. The woodwork was splintered and shattered, its golden pipes, once full of song, were now just gaping mouths, silenced. Whatever value it once held was long gone. Perhaps it was the first thing to be scavenged by thieves or scrappers, or maybe it was sold off piece by piece before the last light was turned out.

Local lore whispers that the church's great bell was stolen, a brazen act of heavy metal theft. I can't confirm if that's true, or if this church even had a bell to begin with. But a story like that feels right for this part of town. In a place like the Bronx, survival often means salvage, and piety doesn't pay the man at the scrap yard. For all my searching, I couldn't find a path up into what was left of the steeple, no way to the space where a bell might have once hung.

My camera clicked nonstop until a surprise awaited on the upper balcony. In a back room sat a narrow bed, sheets still creased from last night. Whoever called this ruin "home" could return at any second.

A fresh wave of adrenaline hit me. I had planned to make my way upstairs to see if I could find a route into the bones of the old steeple. But as I took my first step toward the balcony stairs, a ripple of voices echoed up from below. They were speaking Spanish, their conversation bouncing off the high, domed ceiling. The inhabitants had returned. To my ears, there were three of them, two men and a woman.

My heart hammered against my ribs. I spun around, my eyes darting through the gloom, searching for another way out. There was none. The entrance to the sub-basement was a dark void; the wooden stairs had rotted away long ago. I glanced at a high, open window, but the leap down to the fenced-off sidewalk was too great, especially with my heavy camera bag. I was trapped.

My first instinct was to wait. I crept to the edge of the balcony and peered down at the entrance, hoping they were just passing through. But as the main door creaked open, a dark figure stepped cautiously inside and paused, listening.

And then, it hit me. The pew.

Remember the heavy wooden pew I had pushed aside to get in? It wasn't just a random obstruction. It was their signal. A simple, brilliant marker to know if someone had entered while they were away. By moving it, I hadn't just found an entrance; I had tripped an alarm. My clever entry was a rookie mistake that announced my presence.

A thousand scenarios, each worse than the last, flashed through my mind. Waiting to be discovered in the dark felt far more dangerous than facing them in the light. I made my choice.

Taking a deep breath, I walked deliberately back down to the entrance and through the door. The trio looked up, their conversation cut short. They saw me, a guy with a rather large bag, walking past them in a hurry. I gave a small "Hello," and just kept walking.

Their faces were a mixture of confusion and shock, their eyes wide as I passed. They were so startled they didn't move, didn't speak. They just watched as I navigated the debris on the floor and hopped down the last few steps to the street. I didn't look back. I just let the blistering heat of the city swallow me whole, my heart hammering a wild, frantic rhythm against my ribs.

The building new, with Hoppin & Koen's first and second floor plans inset at the corners. The plans lay out the wedge the architects were handed: auditorium, choir platform, primary department, library, kitchen and dining room all folded into one triangle.

A Beacon for the Bronx

The ruin I had explored was the Christ Congregational Church of Mount Hope. Founded in 1892, its original home was a modest corner a few blocks away, over at 175th Street and Topping Avenue. But as its congregation swelled, so did its ambitions. They needed a building that made a statement.

To bring their vision to life, they hired Hoppin & Koen, a New York City architectural firm of serious repute. Francis L. V. Hoppin and Terence A. Koen were the same minds behind the formidable old New York City Police Headquarters at 240 Centre Street, finished the year before this church went up, and they would go on to build the Albany County Courthouse. They were tasked with creating a beacon for the Bronx, and they delivered a masterpiece in the Georgian and Colonial Revival styles.

They chose a challenging, irregular plot on the corner of the Grand Concourse and East 175th Street and made it sing. The design was magnificent. A formal entrance welcomed visitors through a tall portico held aloft by four grand columns. Above it all, a proud tower rose, its design said to be borrowed from the legendary London churches of Sir Christopher Wren. Red brick with white wood trim, and a domed tin roof painted green. That celestial blue dome that had captured my imagination was the centerpiece of a circular sanctuary seating three hundred and seventy people.

But this was never meant to be just a place for Sunday sermons. The archives revealed a four-bedroom parsonage, a gymnasium, a library, and multiple meeting rooms. This wasn't just a church; it was a community center, a beehive of activity. This design was a direct response to the "institutional church" movement then sweeping American Protestantism, a Social Gospel idea that had produced its own national body, the Open or Institutional Church League, by the mid-1890s. The goal was simple yet profound: to throw the doors open wide and serve the entire neighborhood, regardless of who you were, what you believed, or how much money you had. It was built to be a lifeline. A safe harbor.

Sanborn, 1915. The church sits on block 2826, a triangle pinched between the Concourse and East 175th Street, with Public School No. 28 Annex across the way.

The same sheet corrected to 1950. The name on the triangle has changed to Pilgrim Cong'l Church, and the empty lots of 1915 have filled in with apartment houses on every side.

Seventy-Five Thousand Dollars of Faith

On September 18, 1910, the doors of the Christ Congregational Church of Mount Hope swung open for the first time. The price tag for this new beacon of faith was $75,000, a monumental sum for the era. Accounts of the formal dedication differ, some placing it the following month, others describing a week of services stretching from late February into the first days of March 1911. Three years later the sanctuary was filled with music from an exquisite organ, built by the renowned M.P. Möller of Hagerstown, Maryland, their Opus 1814 of 1914, two manuals and eleven ranks working on a state-of-the-art tubular-pneumatic action. A century later, in 2012, a visit found the magnificent instrument unplayable, its pipes long silent.

The church later became home to the Pilgrim United Church of Christ. Records show a remarkable commitment; former congregants recall the church keeping up regular services and mortgage payments from 1965 all the way until 1988. They owned it free and clear. But ownership couldn't stop the slow, creeping decline. By the 1990s, the lifeblood of the church was draining away. Regular services and upkeep faltered, then stopped altogether in the mid-2000s. The city's building department opened its file on the property on April 23, 1993, with a violation for boilers, the first of more than forty to come.

Even as the grand sanctuary fell silent, a tiny flicker of faith remained. A small group of the remaining members continued to meet in a side room. Their gatherings were a testament to their devotion, shortened by the biting winter cold, with no heat or electricity to offer comfort. Then, in 2008, the scaffolding went up, a metal shroud signaling the beginning of the end. The sidewalk shed permit expired in 2009. The shed is still there.

The Fight Over What It Should Become

The church board's vision was practical: demolish the decaying structure, partner with the Bronx Parent Housing Network on a homeless shelter, and keep a smaller worship space for the handful of remaining congregants. But the community had a different idea. Anthony Nacerino, who chaired the Cultural Affairs Committee of Bronx Community Board 5, started a petition in October 2014 and gathered nearly fourteen hundred signatures calling for the building to be saved. He envisioned it reborn as an all-encompassing arts center, a place to serve the neighborhood as it was originally intended. The sanctuary would become a performing arts venue called the Mount Hope Center of the Arts.

Neither side won. The building was quietly listed for sale in June 2023 as a development site, asking just under four million dollars, marketed not as a church but as nine thousand square feet of irregular triangular land with three street frontages and room for forty-three thousand square feet as of right. A contract was signed in May 2024. It has not closed. Title still sits with Pilgrim United Church, under a decade's worth of tax lien certificates, and by the start of this year the owners were reported to owe more than $360,000 in taxes and fees.

Meanwhile the city has begun to move on its own. On January 9, 2026, the Department of Buildings issued an Unsafe Building violation and an emergency order the same day to repair the fence and the shed and clear the debris. A DOB inspector had already written the building up a year earlier as a structure "rendered non-compliant due to abandoned church open to the elements." News 12 found it in January boarded up, trashed and tagged, with forty-five open violations dating back to 2008. In August a permit was approved for a temporary construction fence. There is still no demolition permit on file.

And here is the part that stings. The building has no protection at all. It is not an individual landmark, and the Grand Concourse Historic District, designated in 2011, stops at East 167th Street, eight blocks south of this corner. Nothing stands between this church and a wrecking ball but paperwork.

The historic structure continues to deteriorate, its doors a revolving entrance for explorers and squatters. The arguments over its future may continue, but one thing feels certain. The demolition crew is coming. And for a building born from such grand faith, it seems no earthly, or even heavenly, intervention can save it now.

In a recent social media post, the colorful mosaic stained glass is no longer attached to the window. No word on whether this was an actual Tiffany-made stained glass production.

📋 Reader Records

⛪ Did you worship under that blue dome?

Somebody out there sat in those curved pews while the Möller still played, or came for the gymnasium and the library rather than the sermon, or stayed on with the last few members meeting in that cold side room with no heat and no lights. I would like to hear from you. I would especially like to know two things nobody has been able to tell me: whether this church ever actually had a bell, and who the small Spanish-speaking congregation was that kept using the side building after the sanctuary closed. Photographs of the interior before the scaffolding went up in 2008 would be worth more than anything else on this page.

📩 Share Your Story or drop a comment below — every contributor gets full credit

⬇ Keep Reading

🛑 Sacred spaces that ran out of time

Churches, synagogues and chapels I got into before the demolition crews did — and a few Bronx landmarks besides.

⛪ Home Street Presbyterian Church Another abandoned Bronx church — but this one got a second life as senior housing. › ✝️ Inside the Abandoned St. Michael and St. Edward Church in Brooklyn A Fort Greene landmark I photographed before it came down in 2023. › 😅 Beth Hamedrash Hagadol: The Abandoned Synagogue of the Lower East Side A 167-year-old Norfolk Street landmark lost to fire in 2017. › 🕊 B'nai Adath Kol Beth Yisrael Shul Demolished A Hebrew Israelite synagogue in Bed-Stuy, gone in 2024. › 📚 Bethel AME Church: A New Chapter for Colored School No. 2 What redevelopment looks like when a congregation's building actually gets saved. › ⚡ The Abandoned Kingsbridge Substation No. 3 Another overlooked Bronx landmark, frozen in time on the Harlem River. ›

📍 1800 Grand Concourse at East 175th Street, Mount Hope, the Bronx. Built in 1910 by Hoppin & Koen for the Christ Congregational Church of Mount Hope, later Pilgrim United Church of Christ, and empty since the mid-2000s. The site went under contract in May 2024 and has not closed; the Department of Buildings declared it an unsafe building in January 2026, and it holds no landmark protection of any kind.

Source(s):

1. New York City Chapter of the American Guild of Organists. (n.d.). Pilgrim United Church of Christ. NYCAGO.
2. Pipe Organ Database. (n.d.). M. P. Möller, Opus 1814 (1914), Pilgrim United Church of Christ, Bronx, New York. Organ Historical Society. https://pipeorgandatabase.org/instruments/42262
3. Pilgrim Congregational Church United Church of Christ. (2009). The Tracker, 53(3), 70–75.
4. Barber, D., & Magonigle, H. V. B. (Eds.). (1911). The New York Architect, 5(1), 151.
5. Abandoned Online. (n.d.). Christ Congregational Church of Mount Hope. https://abandonedonline.net/location/christ-congregational-church-of-mount-hope/
6. Abandoned in 360. (2024, March 24). Exploring the forgotten Pilgrim United Church of the Bronx. https://abandonedin360.com/abandoned-commercial-properties/pilgrim-united-church-of-christ/
7. Slattery, D. (2014, December 12). Bronx residents rally to save historic church slated for demolition. New York Daily News. https://www.nydailynews.com/2014/12/11/bronx-residents-rally-to-save-historic-church-slated-for-demolition/
8. Williams, J. (2015, February 13). Don't demolish historic church: CB5. BX Times. https://www.bxtimes.com/dont-demolish-historic-church-cb5/
9. Sequeira, R. (2022, February 11). Once thriving Grand Concourse church, now just a neglected home to squatters. BX Times. https://www.bxtimes.com/once-thriving-grand-concourse-church-now-just-a-neglected-home-to-squatters/
10. News 12 Bronx. (2026, January 14). Historic church in Mount Hope now boarded up and trashed. https://bronx.news12.com/2026/01/14/historic-church-in-mount-hope-now-boarded-up-and-trashed/5CRqkKg0S6nJWWvI22LetA
11. New York Landmarks Conservancy. (2025, August 19). Bronx church survey: 107 sites in 11 weeks. https://nylandmarks.org/news/bronx-church-survey-107-sites-in-11-weeks/
12. New York City Department of Buildings. (2026). DOB violations and DOB NOW job filings, Bronx block 2826, lot 87. NYC Open Data, datasets 3h2n-5cm9 and w9ak-ipjd.
13. New York City Landmarks Preservation Commission. (2011, October 25). Grand Concourse Historic District designation report (LP-2403). https://s-media.nyc.gov/agencies/lpc/lp/2403.pdf
14. Nacerino, A. (2014, October 22). Save 1800–1808 Grand Concourse from future demolition and transform the structure into the Mount Hope Center of the Arts [Petition]. Change.org. https://www.change.org/p/people-in-favor-of-saving-1800-1808-grand-concourse-save-1800-1808-grand-concourse-from-future-demolition-and-transform-the-structure-into-the-mount-hope-center-of-the-arts
15. Zimmerman, J. (2021, August 16). More spooky doings [Blog post]. https://jeanzimmerman.com/2021/08/16/more-spooky-doings/
16. Sanborn Map Company. (1915). Sanborn fire insurance map from New York, Bronx, vol. 15, sheet 32. Library of Congress. https://www.loc.gov/item/sanborn06116_038/
17. Sanborn Map Company. (1950). Sanborn fire insurance map from New York, Bronx, vol. 15, 1915–July 1950, sheet 32. Library of Congress. https://www.loc.gov/item/sanborn06116_093/
18. Historical Society of the New York Courts. (n.d.). Albany County Courthouse (1916). https://history.nycourts.gov/courthouse/albany-county-courthouse-1916/