and I’ve sat in one of its red velvet chairs and read a book until dawn. I can’t explain why, but its splendor has always made me feel a little closer to the world I wish I inhabited. A fork in the road forty years ago, that would have led to a life, a world, quite different.
It was with a heavy heart that I greeted the news of the Clara DeLea tragedy. I am no innocent to history or human nature. Still, that monstrous act unmoored me. We live in civilized times. We say please and thank you and wipe our faces and asses. Not even our household pets can stand the sight of their own excrement, and yet this woman murdered her own blood. I wanted to know under what circumstances she could do such a thing. I began looking at my wife and daughters differently, at the very notion.
I researched DeLea and found few answers. A history of alcoholism and depression, but I’m in no position to cast stones on either account. She’d never been committed, voluntarily or otherwise. I ran out of things to investigate, so I turned my gaze to the gargoyled creature that had greeted me twice a day, and often in the late evening, for thirteen years.
There are so many remarkable buildings in New York that The Breviary is often overlooked. Few guidebooks mention it, and almost no one but an art history major could identify its design as Chaotic Naturalism. Nonetheless, it is surprising that it has not achieved a cult following, if not for its design, then for its history.
Completed in 1861 in the farmland of what was once Harlem Hills, The Breviary was commissioned by a group of nascent coal prospectors with money to burn. Their incomes increased exponentially during the Civil War, when coal was the only available power source. They provided it to both sides, and though they were charged with treason, the allegations never stuck. By the 1870s, most of them had shown the good sense to start digging for Texas black gold.
The Breviary’s architect, Edgar Schermerhorn, led an infamous career. He designed eighteen buildings. All but one were unsound and eventually condemned. Born in Forest Hills, Queens, his training ground was eastern Europe, and when he returned to Boston and New York, he brought the new school of Chaotic Naturalism back with him. After designing his one success, The Breviary, he went on to construct plans for several slaughterhouses in lower Manhattan that would later be proven inhumane. Under his tutelage, the animals were disemboweled. Screaming, they circled the small stables until they bled to death.
Schermerhorn was quoted saying that The Breviary’s design did not come from him, but rather, through him. He dreamed it, and when he woke, on his bedside table, were its plans, already drawn. Every effort to reproduce those plans, aside from The Breviary, resulted in disaster.
The building got its name Dark Church, not, as some would believe, because the Irish Catholics, who hauled its mortar resented that its main floor was an Episcopalian Church, but because of what happened after that. In 1886, Edgar Schermerhorn hanged himself from a rafter above the church altar. The noose didn’t hold, and he descended thirty feet. The blood from his cracked skull flowed west along the building’s two-degree slant. A year later, his wife was quoted in the New York Tribune saying that whenever she looked inside The Breviary’s stained-glass eyes, the madness of its maker peered back at her. “Like a mollusk trading shells,” she’d said, “He fell so in love with his own creation that he climbed inside it.”
For those unschooled in backwoods superstition, such acts render a church unsanctified. Though I’m not a religious man, it does bear noting that the church was never blessed after Schermerhorn’s death, though it continued to host Chaotic Naturalist masses, a religion its tenants converted to, through the 1970s. It now serves as the lobby in which I now sit and write this article.
Over the years, scandal has plagued the building. In 1916, a doorman who lived in the basement went missing. Two weeks later his body was dug up by a stray dog foraging for food on the grounds that are now St. John the Divine. The original owners of the building did not fare much better. Of the fifteen men and their families occupying its corresponding fifteen floors, only seven survived the Great Depression. The stock market collapse was partly to blame for the