When in Rome…you’ll see what inspired that grand old church in College Hill

Its Boer architect took notes abroad before he teamed up with a respected Catholic architect here in St. Louis.

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One of the things I enjoy most about St. Louis neighborhoods is their overall sense of unity. Go to Soulard or Hyde Park, and you will see rows of three-story Second Empire houses that individually are perfectly beautiful but, working together, create the stunning streetscapes that make our city so unique. Likewise, I marvel at the various expressions of the German or French Gothic Revival that immigrant communities built throughout the city; I never fail to show off spectacular edifices such as St. Francis de Sales on Gravois or Old St. Augustine’s in St. Louis Place. Likewise, I always mention to out-of-town guest that we boast the works of internationally famous architects such as Louis Sullivan, Eero Saarinen, and Maya Lin.

That said, I also like discovering buildings and architects that do not fit neatly into the mold of traditional St. Louis architecture or are not well known even among local architectural aficionados. For example, I have always been drawn to the unique, Baroque Revival structure that was formerly the Most Holy Name of Jesus Roman Catholic Church. It sits at 2047 East Grand Boulevard in the College Hill neighborhood of North St. Louis—for reference, just a block west of the Grand Avenue (“Old White”) Water Tower. Although the building has not been a Catholic church since 1993, it is now occupied by the New Jerusalem Church of God in Christ at the Cathedral and is recognized as City Landmark Number 124.

The former parish, Most Holy Name of Jesus, dated back to 1865, and there was a small Gothic Revival church in what’s now the parking lot east of the present church. The larger church, designed by the Lee & Rush architectural firm, was built to the west in 1916 to allow for continual services. At some point after that, the original parish church was demolished. (You can still see it in the background in this photograph of the water tower).

The story of Henri Rush, one half of the firm, is a fascinating one. He was born Henri Rusch in 1874 in what was to become the country of South Africa. Rusch was a Boer, a descendent of the original Dutch colonists of that region, and he was a soldier fighting against British attempts to conquer the Cape Colony. After falling ill and being captured by the British, he traveled to Great Britain and then Amsterdam. Clearly, he was already intending to become an architect and engineer, as he then traveled around Europe before heading to Cleveland in 1901. He eventually settled in St. Louis in 1903, just in time for the explosion in architecture commissions for the 1904 World’s Fair. Due to his connections to South Africa, Rusch designed the Boer Exhibition Building as well as the Airdome. He then went to work for the City of St. Louis, and he founded the firm of Lee & Rush with James Sidney Lee. I suspect Rusch chose to Anglicize his name to Rush out of concern that his original surname sounded too German, particularly during World War I—even though his homeland of South Africa was an ally against the German Empire.

Lee doesn’t have as dashing a biography, but he, too, was a driving force of the firm. Born a year after Rusch, in 1875, Lee came from a prominent Virginia English background. He graduated from Smith Academy, alongside many prominent industrialists’ sons, and went straight into architecture school. His connections in influential Roman Catholic lay fraternities, along with his firm’s elegant designs, won him the chance to design many churches and other ecclesiastic buildings in St. Louis.

 Around 1916, the Lutheran Rusch and his Catholic partner Lee secured the commission for the new Most Holy Name of Jesus Roman Catholic Church, which sat on the aforementioned, prominent stretch of East Grand. Sadly, due to the extensive demolition of the commercial building stock around the Grand Water Tower, the original context of the church has been lost, but photographs give us an impression of the density. Just as Rusch would have seen in Rome or Florence, the front elevation received the most attention, because other buildings would have blocked the view of the flanks. What’s so fascinating to me about the design is its obvious homage to so many famous churches from the Renaissance and Baroque eras from the 15th to the 17th centuries.

First, photographs show us the influence of the seminal church façade designed by the great Italian art theorist and architect, Leon Battista Alberti, at Santa Maria Novella in Florence. Alberti was given a problem to solve: hide the Gothic ungainly tall nave with its two lower aisles with a façade that evinced ancient Greek and Roman concepts of balance and geometry. Alberti’s solution was ingenious and highly influential: Using a series of proportions based on squares and circles, he added two classical temple pediments, one on top of each other, to hide the barbaric Gothic architecture. Looking at the façade of Most Holy Name, we see the same approximate proportions in the church front—and even the same circular window.

Il Gesu in Rome

Photo by Chris Naffziger

Il Gesu in Rome

Il Gesu, in Rome

For a more immediate source of inspiration, we move forward in time to a critically influential church built in the years after the Counter Reformation, when the Catholic Church sought to address the criticisms of Martin Luther and other Protestants. The church that best symbolizes these reforms is known commonly as Il Gesù in Italian, but its official name in Italian is Chiesa del Santissimo Nome di Gesù, or, in English, “Church of the Most Holy Name of Jesus,” which just so happens to be the name of the St. Louis church in question. Lee and Rusch must have thought it appropriate to seek inspiration from its Italian namesake, designed by Giacomo della Porta, because there are striking similarities in the two façades. Influenced by Alberti’s Santa Maria Novella façade, della Porta added striking paired Corinthian pilasters and other delicate details. Huge Baroque volutes accented the sides of the clerestory window. Inside, the huge barrel-vaulted interior, designed by Giacomo da Vignola, was free of obstructions so the congregation could easily see the pulpit; again, looking at the interior of our St. Louis church, we see a wide, open space clear of distractions.

We might also look to the Church of Santa Susanna, designed by Carlo Maderno, as a source of the diminutive volutes that Lee and Rusch placed on either side of the window of Most Holy Name. These are not the grand volutes of Il Gesù, but smaller and more restrained. I suspect that Rusch saw Santa Susanna on his way from Rome’s train station to the center of the city and sketched the unassuming little church. It is interesting that he was drawn to it, as the Baroque was quite out of style at the time.

Finally, there’s the bell tower, or campanile, of Most Holy Name. It sits back, more Romanesque Revival than Baroque. Why? In some ways, it reminds me of the old Gothic spire of Santa Maria Novella, but it also aroused a memory of my recent visit to the church of San Silvestro in Capite, an ancient church in Rome with a 12th-century campanile. Carlo Maderno was commissioned to incongruously “Baroque Up” the church in the 17th century, so we have a Medieval tower sticking up above a wedding cake of a façade. It is admittedly strange, but it’s also what makes Rome—and St. Louis—wonderful. The bell tower at Most Holy Name may echo that tower as it proudly rises above the crowded, bustling streets of St. Louis.

In my research, I found the name of one man who certainly looked up at that tower. The Rev. Patrick Paul Crane was the priest at Most Holy Name in the early 20th century. He may have watched the building of the new church. He may have known of the Italian churches it echoed.

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