A congregation reinvents itself while a community reels from another loss

Johanna Garcia, a member of the Save Fort Washington Collegiate Church, now rebranded as The Fort Washington Community Church, joins Led and Octavio to discuss what the next steps are for her congregation and to raise awareness about what the ongoing loss of our community spaces means for our neighborhood. 

This important episode of Uptown Voices describes latest turn of events in negotiations with the Marble Collegiate Church system which, as of June 30th, has evicted the Fort Washington Community Church from its premises and scrubbed its bylaws of any legal ties it had with the historic congregation that anchored this crucial site in Washington Heights. 

As of Tuesday, July 15, we still have no idea what is going to happen with the site. The Collegiate System has not been reachable and its only community-facing announcements are found on its website. 

Garcia says that this community, whether one is a member of the congregation or not, must flex its muscle and raise its voice to have a say as to what will ultimately happen to the site. 

Certainly, the prominent corner of 181st and Fort Washington Avenue cannot become another of the growing disused and abandoned lots that are currently blighting this neighborhood, she says. Worse still, as the former site of the Coliseum remains abandoned, the blocks between Broadway and Fort Washington Ave. are about to become book-ended by unused prime real estate.

Advocates fighting for this congregation and those who are fighting to improve the quality of life of this community call on residents and elected officials to take a stand. "We’ve reached our limit," they say. The congregation is crushed. Garcia asks, "How is it Christian for a church to evict its poorest and most diverse congregation, which it had promised to help sustain, all because of the poor financial outcomes of decisions made by its overarching church leadership? "

All in all, it raises worrisome concerns about the direction of the institution. 

Is the church - which was founded after Dutch Reformed settlers bought the land that eventually became Manhattan from the Lenape in an unfair transaction and whose early clergy also included slaveholders - reverting to its ethnocentric ideology and the financial shell-games of its past, which the church elders had vowed to address and fix in 2020? 

All this and more is addressed in this episode of Uptown Voices, available here, and everywhere you listen you tour podcasts.