10 Park Avenue

This 28-story apartment building stands where a church used to be.

The Community Church of New York had worshipped on this corner for more than 60 years. Its minister was John Haynes Holmes.

In 1930, the congregation wanted a new church. They came up with an ingenious plan to pay for it: a church earns no rent, but a hotel on Park Avenue would.

So the congregation tore down its own church. It replaced it with an apartment hotel, where people lived in small apartments and got hotel service. The hotel's income would pay for a new church on the lot next door.

The Depression arrived while the hotel was going up, and money was suddenly short. Work briefly resumed in the late 1930s, but World War II soon stopped it. Building materials were going to the war.

Holmes delivered his first sermon in the new church in 1948, 18 years after the old one came down. The congregation owned the hotel for another 25 years. It became a co-op in 1974, when residents bought their own apartments.