Preserving Chelsea Square
A city block of open green space ringed by more than a dozen historic buildings, the campus of The General Theological Seminary is the living heart of the Chelsea neighborhood. The oldest building on campus dates from 1836. Most of the others are a century old, having been designed and constructed as a group by Dean Augustus Hoffman and architect Charles Coolidge Haight. These beautiful buildings, and the serene landscape they surround, are an irreplaceable legacy for the Seminary’s students and faculty, the Chelsea community, and all New Yorkers.
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But these buildings are also hard to maintain and have weathered badly over the years. Since 1999, the Seminary has invested $9 million in restoring them, receiving the prestigious Lucy G. Moses Preservation Award for one of these projects. But much more needs to be done. Architects have estimated that the Seminary must spend $21 million immediately to secure the roofs and outer walls, so the historic buildings will suffer no further damage. Full renovation will cost an estimated $68 million total.
On top of this, the Seminary also faces a critical problem with Sherrill Hall, the undistinguished, non-historic building on the eastern edge of Chelsea Square, at Ninth Avenue. Sherrill Hall is literally falling apart. Engineers have concluded that the Seminary can either invest millions of dollars in patching it up or else demolish it and start over.
Fortunately, these problems can be solved. The Seminary is already implementing a preservation plan that can save the historic structures, keep the landscape open, and replace Sherrill Hall with an architecturally superior new building.
Read more: Fact Sheet: The General Theological Seminary of the Episcopal Church
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