Greek Orthodox church lost on 9/11 rises again at ground zero
A Greek Orthodox church taking shape next to the World Trade Center memorial plaza will glow at night like a marble beacon when it opens sometime next year. It also will mark another step in the long rebuilding of New York’s ground zero.
The St Nicholas National Shrine, designed by renowned architect Santiago Calatrava, will replace a tiny church that was crushed by the trade center’s south tower on September 11, 2001. The new church will give Greek Orthodox believers a place to worship while also welcoming visitors of any faith who want to reflect on the lives lost in the terrorist attacks.
“It is such a significant church because of what happened here,” said Jerry Dimitriou, executive director of the Greek Orthodox Archdiocese of America, which oversees 540 parishes and approximately 1.5 million Greek Orthodox faithful across the United States. He said people may want to stop and pray after they’ve been to the National September 11 Memorial and Museum, a few paces away. “We will give them a place to come and sit, and sit inside of a church,” Dimitriou said.
The large crowd that will assemble today for a ceremony on the 16th anniversary of the terror attacks will be able to see the unfinished church, now a raw-looking structure covered in concrete and plywood.
It is one of a handful of unfinished pieces of the reconstruction of the huge trade center site, which is now a combination of green trees, polished stone and glassy towers after being known for years as a dusty, gray construction zone. Two of four planned office towers are now open. A third is set to open in spring 2018 with Spotify as an anchor ten- ant. A fourth office tower and a performing arts center are yet to be built. The church, tucked in a park on the southern edge of the site, is Calatrava’s second World Trade Center commission.
The estimated cost for St Nicholas is $50 million. Unlike the transit hub, built largely with federal transportation dollars, the church is being funded through donations from disparate sources including the Greek government, Greek Orthodox church members around the world and, Dimitriou said, the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Boston and the Italian city of Bari, whose patron saint is St Nicholas.
The church they are building hardly resembles other Calatrava projects such as the Oculus or the Milwaukee Art Museum with their distinctive ribbed wings. Rather, it was inspired by two Byzantine shrines in Istanbul, the Hagia Sophia and the Church of the Holy Savior in Chora.
The original St Nicholas was far more modest. The 35-foot-tall (11-meter-tall) building housed a tavern when Greek immigrants bought it in 1919 to use as a church. The church stayed put when the trade center’s monumental twin towers were built in the 1970s.
“All of the buildings around it were sold,” said Olga Pavlakos, a parish board member whose grandparents were among St Nicholas’s founders. “We stood our ground. Greeks are tough people.”
Pavlakos said the new church’s welcoming stance honors the legacy of the old St Nicholas, where area office workers often stopped to light a candle during their lunch hours. “It’s not only for Greek people, it’s a place for everybody,” she said. “And that’s what we stood for before, so this is a continuation.”