UES Building To Be Demolished Ahead Of Church Development

UPPER EAST SIDE, NY — An Evangelical Christian church has filed permits to demolish an Upper East Side building, records show, paving the way for a new ministry center that it plans to construct.

Redeemer Presbyterian Church filed permits Friday to tear down the six-story building at 150 East 91st St., between Third and Lexington avenues. It comes nearly a year after Patch first reported that the church had acquired the building for $29.5 million from seller GPG Properties.

All tenants in the 25-unit building vacated their apartments before the sale, a representative told Patch last year.

Once demolition is complete, Redeemer plans to build a 10-story, 150-foot-tall building that will feature a 600-seat sanctuary, a 300-person fellowship hall and up to 17 classrooms, church elder James Herring told parishioners in a video message.

The church aims to break ground in late 2021 and complete the building by early 2023, according to a timeline.

Redeemer has roots on the Upper East Side, having first held services in 1989 in a Seventh-Day Adventist congregation on 87th Street.

Led by Pastor Timothy Keller, it has since grown to more than 5,000 members across five Manhattan locations by catering largely to working professionals, according to a 2017 profile of the church. Keller retired in 2017.

Redeemer is in the middle of an aggressive expansion campaign, aiming to raise $80 million by 2026 to help construct dozens of new churches around the city. Its long-term goal is to grow New York's Evangelical population to 15 percent of the city, up from about 5 percent.

Its expansions have stoked controversy on at least one occasion, on the Upper West Side, where residents alleged in 2011 that the church misled them about the size of its new West 83rd Street location, in which a four-story parking garage was set to be converted into a roughly 10-story church building. Two ironworkers on the project were also killed in February 2011 after falling down an elevator shaft.

Redeemer eventually downsized the building after failing a city audit.

"Redeemer looks forward to having not only a local presence on the Upper East Side that will allow us to better serve our congregants but also a community and cultural space that contributes to the flourishing of our neighbors," Rev. Dr. Abe Cho, senior pastor of Redeemer Presbyterian Church East Side, said in a news release last summer.

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