Unitarian Church of All Souls
Unitarian Universalist congregation in New York City
The Unitarian Church of All Souls at 1157 Lexington Avenue at East 80th Street on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, New York City was built in 1932 and was designed by Hobart Upjohn – Richard Upjohn's grandson – in the Neo-colonial style with a Regency-influenced brick base. It is the congregation's fourth sanctuary. The congregation, dating back to 1819, was the first Unitarian Universalist congregation in the city. It has provided a pulpit for some of the movement's leading theologians and has also recorded many eminent persons in its membership.
History
All Souls was the first Unitarian congregation to be organized in New York and originated in 1819 when Lucy Channing Russell invited forty friends and neighbors into her Lower Manhattan home to listen to an address by her brother, William Ellery Channing, the minister of the Federal Street Church in Boston. Channing was making a stop in New York while traveling to Baltimore to preach the famous sermon in which he would articulate the distinctive tenets of Unitarian Christianity, the most salient of which were the rejection of the Trinity in favor of absolute monotheism, and the imperative to interpret the Christian Bible through reason. In New York, the enthusiasm aroused by Channing culminated in the formation of the First Congregational Church (Unitarian), which proceeded to erect its first building in 1820–21, on Chambers Street between Church Street and Chapel Street, before it had even found a minister. The task of recruitment was difficult since few ministers could be persuaded to venture away from the stability of the Unitarian heartland in New England and risk their careers in new congregations beyond. Finally, on December 18, 1821, William Ware was installed as the first minister.
In 1845, the congregation moved to a new building at 548 Broadway, renaming itself the Church of the Divine Unity the following year.
Begin with the source’s own compact description: “Unitarian Church of All Souls” is unitarian Universalist congregation in New York City. The dossier treats that line as a proposition to test through Unitarian, Church and Souls, not as a finished interpretation.
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The phrase “unitarian Universalist congregation in New York City” supplies a clear boundary for inquiry. It also exposes the unanswered questions: who defined that boundary, when it became stable and which sources sit outside it.
Maps, plans, fabric surveys and administrative records can establish how the site’s name, extent and function changed over time. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 2, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q7887186. VIAF identifies the subject as 262604826. The Library of Congress control number is n80073838. Authority coordinates are 40.776, -73.958. 2 of 5 selected statements include explicit references; 1 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1157, 1932, 1819 and 1820.
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This entry incorporates text from “Unitarian Church of All Souls” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.