Thanks to our friends at Old Newark and Have You Met Newark for bringing our team into this great conversation about one of Newark, NJ’s historic University Height’s landmarks on Capstone Elite’s Facebook Page!
Located at the intersection of 13th Avenue and Boston Streets within Newark’s Society Hill residential complex, here’s a great photograph taken by Newark’s own Anthony Alvarez capturing the juxtaposition of the historic landmark African Presbyterian Church abutting another historic first representing the re-birth of the University Height’s residential renaissance in 1990’s of home-ownership and market rate housing after the pivotal riots that shook the city to it’s core in the 1960’s.
In the foreground, you can notice the inscription on the stone wall dating this section of the historic church back to 1888. To read more about this topic and learn more, you can visit Old Newark’s original facebook post here.
First African Presbyterian Church/Plane Street Presbyterian Church/Thirteenth Avenue Presbyterian Church
Black leaders who were unhappy with being permitted to worship instead of being invited to worship broke away from the First Presbyterian church and formed their own Presbyterian mission. Theodore Frelinghuysen donated a lot on Plane Street and persuaded a number of prominent citizens to help erect the new church. It was dedicated on May 7, 1835 at 132 Plane Street. An enlargement was completed in 1852. In 1910 the congregation moved to the church at Thirteenth Avenue and Boston Street. This church was the former home of the Wicliffe Presbyterian Church. The third Reverend of the church, Elymas Payson Rogers, went on to missionary work in Africa, where he died of fever in 1861.