Social Justice in Stone and Wood: St. Paul’s, Carroll Street, and the Refusal to Segregate Sacred Space.
St. Paul’s Episcopal Church on Carroll Street in Brooklyn has always been less a monument than a decision, renewed across generations, about who belongs and how close they are allowed to come. Founded in the mid nineteenth century as Brooklyn expanded into a working port city, St. Paul’s Episcopal Church was built in the Gothic Revival tradition not to awe from a distance but to be inhabited. Its long nave pulls the eye directly toward the altar, refusing architectural evasions.
There is no visual logic that pushes people aside, upward, or out of sight. In a period when galleries were often used, formally or informally, to segregate Black worshipers, immigrants, and the poor, the church organized its space so that everyone shared the same line of sight, the same approach, the same forward movement.
That spatial choice became a theology under the parish’s Anglo Catholic renewal in the early twentieth century. Beauty here was not an ornament reserved for the few but a conviction that sacrament, art, music, saints, incense, silence, and ceremonial belonged to working people as much as to anyone else. The liturgy at St. Paul’s has long been deliberate, reverent, and unapologetically rich, marked by chant, incense, careful ritual movement, and an understanding that worship forms people through the body as much as the mind. The vestments worn at the altar are part of this formation. Crafted, layered, and deeply symbolic, they clothe the priest not as an individual personality but as a servant of a shared tradition, offering dignity not only to the celebrant but to the entire congregation who witnesses the rite.
Much of this interior devotional world was shaped by Ralph Adams Cram, one of the most influential Gothic Revival architects in America. At St. Paul’s, Cram designed the Lady Chapel and the Chapel of St. Joseph, integrating them seamlessly into the earlier Gothic structure rather than treating them as decorative appendages. His work here is intimate rather than monumental, meant to be encountered at close range, at kneeling height, in daily prayer.
The Lady Chapel is especially rich, its painted surfaces and carved woodwork telling the story of the life of Mary in sequence and detail. Scenes unfold with a medieval narrative clarity, not stylized abstraction but careful storytelling, rendered in color, line, and ornament meant to reward repeated looking. The woodwork is dense with symbolic carving, vines, flowers, and Marian emblems worked by hand, insisting that devotion be tactile as well as visual. The chapel does not merely honor Mary; it invites the worshiper into her story, linking incarnation, obedience, sorrow, and joy through image and space.
The Chapel of St. Joseph offers a complementary vocabulary. Where the Lady Chapel is luminous and narrative, St. Joseph’s Chapel emphasizes strength, guardianship, and sanctified labor. Its iconography gathers saints across the Catholic and Anglican worlds, asserting continuity rather than rupture. Alongside figures long honored in Catholic devotion appear distinctly Anglican saints, including Charles I, remembered as Charles the Martyr. His presence signals an Anglican willingness to sanctify conscience, sacrifice, and fidelity to faith even unto death. In this chapel, Italian immigrant devotion, Anglican memory, and working class spirituality are not separated. They are held together in wood, paint, and prayer.
Side chapels, shrines, carved Stations of the Cross, and the richly articulated high altar together complete a devotional language immediately recognizable to Italian congregants and deeply resonant for West Indian worshipers shaped by Catholic and Anglican traditions. The altar is elevated but not remote. The rail marks a threshold meant to be crossed, not a barrier meant to warn people back. Christ is believed to be truly present, and people are expected to approach.
Along the walls, the Stations of the Cross unfold at human height, devotional rather than academic, meant to be prayed with rather than admired from afar. Their placement matters. They sit where bodies pass, where grief and endurance are not hidden or aestheticized but acknowledged as part of common life. Suffering is named here, and then walked through together.
Above the pews hang model ships, ex votos in a long maritime Christian tradition. They are not decoration. They are prayers made solid. Brooklyn was a port city, and parishioners worked the docks, sailed ships, crossed oceans, by choice and by force. The Atlantic and the Caribbean are carried into the church’s air. To suspend the ships over the congregation, rather than isolate them in a corner, is to say that migration is not peripheral to the church’s story. It is central. The crossings that brought people here are worthy of remembrance and blessing.
Between the late nineteen twenties and the mid twentieth century, Western Caribbean parishioners came to St. Paul’s seeking full sacramental life. They found something rare, not tolerance but belonging. Not the gallery but the front pews. That choice was not symbolic. Descendants of those families still sit in the front pews today, their presence continuous rather than commemorative.
Italian devotion also took visible, permanent form. Shrines to saints were not treated as quaint ethnic leftovers but as legitimate expressions of faith. The last of these was the shrine to St. Anthony of Padua, established by an Italian family after the death of their seventeen year old child in a car accident. In Italian Catholic devotion, St. Anthony is often invoked for what has been lost, objects, people, certainty itself. The family transformed private grief into public prayer, creating a place to kneel, to light candles, to return again and again when words failed. That this shrine stands inside an Episcopal church is not incidental. It shows how fully St. Paul’s made room for immigrant grief without demanding that it be softened, abstracted, or hidden. The shrine does not explain the loss. It simply insists that the life mattered, and that sorrow itself belongs in the open.
The church’s theology of presence extends beyond the main sanctuary. Nearby stands St. Andrew’s House, a companion building with its own chapel and an outdoor Sacrament House designed to reserve the Blessed Sacrament outside the nave. Its placement is deliberate. The Sacrament is kept where no one must walk over it, where bodily movement itself expresses reverence. This is not liturgical fussiness. It reflects a pastoral instinct shaped by working people and crowded lives. How bodies move in space matters when Christ is believed to be truly present. Reverence is protected architecturally, and access to prayer is extended quietly, without spectacle.
For a period, St Andrew’s House was occupied by members of the Society of St John the Evangelist, commonly known as the Cowley Fathers. Their disciplined life of prayer and sacramental devotion formed part of the parish’s spiritual rhythm, and their presence was not marginal. They held their own pew within the church, a visible sign that religious life, daily prayer, and communal worship belonged at the heart of parish space rather than at its edges.
St. Andrew’s House also preserves medieval stained glass and historic ecclesiastical furniture, not as museum artifacts but as living witnesses. These elements anchor Brooklyn worship within a much older Christian memory, reminding those who pray there that their faith is continuous with centuries of belief, craft, and devotion. Within parish tradition, St. Paul’s is also remembered as the site of the first cross placed on an Anglican altar in America, at a time when communion tables were typically left unadorned. Whether understood as documented fact or faithfully preserved memory, the tradition reveals something essential about the parish. St. Paul’s chose visibility. It refused to hide the cross or soften its implications.
Then there is the door. Framed by carved stone angels and saints and painted a vivid red, it announces sanctuary before anyone steps inside. Historically, red doors marked churches as places of refuge and mercy. At St. Paul’s, the symbolism is enacted. The door opens onto a church that does not segregate worshipers into galleries, does not ration beauty, does not erase immigrant devotion, and does not separate justice from ritual. You can trace a straight line from that door, down the nave, under the ships, past the Stations, to the altar rail, and outward again to the Sacrament kept with care at St. Andrew’s House. It is a physical theology.
From the First World War, when the rector, Andrew Chalmers Wilson, carried Holy Communion to soldiers dying in the field and the parish later marked that witness in memorial, to September 11, when the church opened its doors for prayer, silence, and the naming of the dead, St. Paul’s responded to catastrophe in the same way it always had, by bringing the sacrament and making room for grief rather than retreating from it. In those moments, its mission ceased to be an idea and became something enacted, embodied, and real.
St. Paul’s has survived not by freezing itself in time but by making room, and then defending that room with beauty, discipline, and clarity of purpose. It is not only a story about architecture or liturgy. It is the record of a decision, made repeatedly, not to put anyone in the gallery when there were front seats to be filled. During my visit today and thanks to the generous welcome of the rector, Fr William Ogborn, I truly felt the presence of our Lord in this holy space. Please, keep this community in your prayers.
