FORGOTTEN New York already has a category dedicated to streets that have vanished, Street Necrology, but I may need to institute a new category dedicated to the buildings we are losing in a rapid sequence in 2026. I’ve already lamented the South Oxford Street Italianate mansion (lost to a developer) as well as the Reformed Dutch Church of Astoria Village (lost to a fire). I need to add another to the list: South Bushwick Reformed, at Bushwick Avenue and Himrod Street, where a 3-alarm fire broke out on June 19, 2026, destroying most of it, and demolition permits were acquired by the city on this date.
We visited this church on Forgotten NY’s sole tour of Bushwick on June 27, 2010, before gentrification had truly arrived later in the decade. I wrote in the tour synopsis, “The steeple was teetering and in need of a paint job but the South Bushwick Reformed Church, a ‘wedding cake white,’ Ionic-columned church, built in 1853 and known as The White Church, remains a Bushwick touchstone decked out in clapboard and milk glass. The cross street is named for its first pastor John Himrod.”
Quoting from the NYC Landmarks Preservation Commission designation report:
The Reformed Church of South Bushwick is an excellent example of the adaptation of a Georgian type masonry church, with tower, to a Greek Revival church of frame construction. Its dominant features are the classic portico and the soaring tower which rises from a square base through a handsome octagonal belfry to an octagonal spire. This type of steeple once characterized the skyline of London with its appearance on the numerous churches which the architect Sir Christopher Wren and his follower James Gibbs built to replace those lost in the Great Fire. This style of church continued as the model of many churches in England and America.
The congregation will likely build a new church, but will probably employ a modern design, as is the usual thing now.
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7/14/26