Before his
death, George Hendric Houghton made clear his wish that his nephew
George Clarke Houghton, a priest in Hoboken, New Jersey, should succeed
him. The younger Houghton's ministry was principally one of enlargement
and enrichment, based upon his uncle's solid foundation. The Lady Chapel
was a gift from George Clarke Houghton in memory of his wife, Mary, who
had died in 1902, after living only six years in this parish.The liturgical life of the parish grew apace, heavily influenced from the turn of the century until the early 1920s by the developing Anglo-Catholic movement in the American Episcopal Church. In 1920 our parish was host to the Second Anglo-Catholic Congress, a national conclave of like-minded members of the Episcopal Church that was inspired by the great Anglo-Catholic Congresses of the turn of the century in England.
To improve communications among members of our increasingly far-flung congregation, Dr. Houghton instituted a four-page newsletter called the Kalendar, in which the rector would try to make his views known through the use of fictional dialogues. Each week 1500 copies were distributed.
The desire of young couples to be married in our church grew as the twentieth century matured. Our second rector set a standard of serious marriage instruction, grounded and nurtured in the Christian faith and life. Today, as throughout our history, our clergy prepare couples with care, in adherence to the marriage laws of the Episcopal Church, which enjoins the Christian values of lifelong marital fidelity and commitment to family life.
One notable event during the rectorate of the second Dr. Houghton was the funeral of O. Henry (William Sydney Porter), when an incident occurred that embodied the sardonic twist of many of the beloved short stories of this famous writer. O. Henry lived at the Caledonia Hotel on Twenty-sixth Street and mentioned the church in several stories, including "The Romance of the Busy Broker" and "The Cop and the Anthem." When he died it was natural that his body should lie in the church's St. Joseph of Arimathea mortuary chapel. His funeral was scheduled for a June day in 1910 at eleven o'clock. 
Unfortunately a wedding had been scheduled for the same time. Luckily the groom spied the hearse as he approached the church and managed to whisk his future bride away to the nearby Holland House Hotel for an hour until the funeral was over. The bride never knew what had transpired until long after her wedding day.
After World War I many of the families resident in our geographical parish began to migrate uptown. New businesses moved into our neighborhood, and large urban office buildings were constructed in place of the old town houses that had lined the streets of the East Twenties and Thirties north of Madison Square.
The Church in Modern Times
Return to the "Little Church" home page