Cathedral House at 24 Rector Street Will Come Down Within Two Months, With a Memorial Park Planned in Its Place
All city approvals are in place for NJPAC to demolish the 1941 Cathedral House as part of its $300 million campus project, according to the center's real-estate chief — and the memorial planned for the site, designed by artist Nina Cooke John, would preserve part of the facade of the building that hosted the 1967 National Black Power Convention.
The Cathedral House at 24 Rector Street, the 1941 former rectory of the Episcopal Diocese of Newark on the New Jersey Performing Arts Center campus, will be demolished within the next two months, according to NJPAC executive vice president for real estate and capital projects Timothy Lizura, as reported by TAPinto Newark and carried in the Jersey Bee's Essex County Daily Buzz. All approvals have been issued by the city, Lizura said. The demolition is part of NJPAC's $300 million campus construction project.
The building's fate was decided after a long preservation fight. Jersey Digs reported that Newark's Landmarks Commission voted 5-2 to allow the demolition, after NJPAC argued that asbestos discovered during an earlier partial demolition would be too expensive to remediate and could imperil the wider project's financing and deadlines. The arts organization had agreed in 1993 to protect the Cathedral House, and preservationists told the commission that a park could not carry the building's history the way the structure itself does — the Cathedral House hosted the National Black Power Convention in 1967.
What replaces it is meant to answer that argument. Jersey Digs reported on October 19 that artist Nina Cooke John, who also designed Newark's Harriet Tubman Monument, unveiled the memorial design at the September Landmarks Commission meeting: part of the Cathedral House facade, including Paula Scher's supergraphics mural, would be preserved, the building's original entrance would serve as a gateway into a public garden park, and historical exhibits would tell the site's story. Lizura said the memorial is planned for completion next year, in time for the 60th anniversary of the 1967 Black Power Conference, and called the park a permanent one.
