09/01/2026
From the Archives: St. Mark’s Church in-the-Bowery Rectory.
Some projects aren’t just jobs; they are relationships spanning decades. ESKW/Architects had already spent years restoring St. Mark’s Church, Church Yards, and the Rectory’s exterior before the interior finally came calling.
Designed in 1900 by Ernest Flagg, the Rectory stood proudly in the St. Mark’s Historic District until a 1988 fire gutted its interior. The exterior was restored by 1991 but inside, the landmark sat vacant, waiting for its second act.
That act meant threading building-wide HVAC invisibly through historic rooms, rebuilding nearly 75% of one room’s ornate plaster crown from fire-damaged fragments, hand-matching woodwork to century-old profiles, and testing 40+ paint samples for the right palette. Outside, the cast-iron stoop on 11th Street was restored to its mid-century detail, and a crumbling concrete stair at the Church Yard entrance was replaced with brownstone and new cast-iron railings.
In 1999, the Neighborhood Preservation Center opened its doors, becoming one of the first resources of its kind in NYC. The Rectory had found its purpose again, and NPC had found its home: by 2001, over 4,000 New Yorkers had walked through, with organizations like the Historic District Council and Greenwich Village Society for Historic Preservation calling it theirs too. For two decades, the space held that role until 2020, when NPC evolved into a virtual hub for community preservation citywide.
