Church
History

Saints Peter and Paul Orthodox Cathedral on Grand Street is the second oldest Slavic Orthodox parish in New Jersey, founded in 1907 by Eastern European immigrants who had chosen the ancient Byzantine faith over the accommodations being demanded of them by local Roman Catholic bishops. Its congregation belongs to the self-governing Orthodox Church in America, under the Diocese of New York and New Jersey. The building stands as a Contributing Resource of the Paulus Hook Historic District, listed on the State and National Register of Historic Places since 1982.

For more than two centuries, this corner of Grand Street has been reserved exclusively for worship. The parish's story begins decades before Orthodoxy arrived here: in the swampy undeveloped frontier of Paulus Hook.

The provenance of the church lot dates to the Associates of the Jersey Company, a development corporation formed for Paulus Hook in 1804. Its leading investors (New York Federalists Anthony Dey, Jacob Radcliffe, Richard Varick, and their attorney Alexander Hamilton, among others) were merchants and lawyers intent on transforming the farms and marshlands of Paulus Hook into a prosperous community. They leased the swampy, frontier-like Hudson River waterfront property from Cornelius Van Vorst (1728–1818), a descendant of the site's early seventeenth-century Dutch proprietor.

The Jersey Company commissioned surveyor Joseph F. Mangin to map the tract, dividing it into 200-by-400-foot blocks and subdividing those into 1,344 lots of 25-by-100 feet, most of which were underwater. One thousand shares were offered to prospective buyers to raise revenue for the project.

Among the incentives to attract settlement was a striking designation: at the highest and driest point of the survey, four lots were marked "church grounds", the only sites named on the original map. As historian Barbara Petrick explains, the original proprietors assumed it was the churches that would provide the anchor of civilization, bringing schools and the formation of decent citizens in their wake.

Four churches were eventually established on the donated properties, though the area's population grew more slowly than the Associates had anticipated. St. Matthew's Protestant Episcopal Church, organized in 1808, was the first to take advantage of the offer, installing its cornerstone in 1831. Saint Peter's Roman Catholic Church began that same year on Grand Street, and the Methodists built a brick church on York Street by 1843.

In 1807, the Associates approached members of the Dutch Reformed Church at Bergen Hill to build on the south side of Grand Street. The offer was declined for want of sufficient male members to form a Consistory. The Associates then offered the lot to Presbyterians, who in 1826 laid a cornerstone for a wooden church, the First Presbyterian Church, capable of accommodating 400 parishioners.

The New York Times described the Grand Street property at the time: the ground was all swamp, and the church stood upon 500 piles. Flooding repeatedly threatened the structure, and Dutch farmers of the district reportedly saved it on at least one occasion by hauling fresh earth to bury the exposed piles beneath their carts.

The First Presbyterian Church on Grand Street was short-lived. A change of church affiliation in 1830 converted the congregation to Dutch Reformed. The Grand Street Church, as it was commonly known, never completed the stone structure required under the Associates' agreement, and struggled with unstable leadership and finances for years. A separate First Presbyterian Church was eventually established in 1844 at Sussex and Washington Streets.

On September 22, 1853, the Dutch Reformed Church installed a cornerstone on Grand Street for a cut-stone Gothic Revival church to replace the wooden structure, built on a lot then adjacent to Lyceum Hall, which had served as the first Hudson County courthouse until 1843. Among the items placed in the cornerstone's cavity were the psalms of the Reformed Dutch Church and its constitution.

The first architect engaged for the project was Scottish-born John W. Welch (1824–1894) of Brooklyn, known for the landmark St. Luke's Protestant Episcopal Church in his hometown and Eberhardt Hall at what is now the New Jersey Institute of Technology. A dispute with Welch and cost overages of more than the intended $20,000 left the building with only its outer walls and required the engagement of a new architect.

The New York Times identified the new architect as "Mr. M. Lineau, of Jersey City": in all likelihood Detlef Lienau (1818–1887), born in Denmark's region that later became part of Germany. Trained in Germany and Paris, Lienau immigrated to America to join his brother Michael in Jersey City, becoming one of the founders of the American Institute of Architects. His Jersey City work included Grace Church Van Vorst at 39 Erie Street (1850), the Mechanics and Traders Bank Building (1859), the original First National Bank building at One Exchange Place (1864), and the American Sugar Refinery at 174 Washington Street (1863).

The completed Dutch Reformed Church, dedicated April 5, 1857, was described by the Times as built of brown sandstone from Belleville and Little Falls in "perpendicular Gothic of the Twentieth Century." Its nave stretched 48 feet high and 30 feet wide beneath an open-timbered roof. The 106-by-70-foot structure held ten stained-glass windows, 128 pews for 750 persons, gas lights, and ten arches on eight columns. Final costs doubled the original estimate, making it the most expensive church then standing in Jersey City.

By the 1870s, Jersey City's population surged with immigration and industrialization. Political consolidation in 1870, three major railway lines, and employment at Colgate, the Great Atlantic & Pacific Tea Company, P. Lorillard Tobacco, American Sugar Refining, and Dixon Crucible drew newcomers in waves. The population climbed from 82,000 to 200,000 by 1900, a scale of growth the Associates of the Jersey Company could not have imagined when they platted these blocks in a swamp.

Between Nemolovsky's elevation to the episcopate in 1909 and the arrival of the third permanent rector in 1920, at least seven clergymen served the parish. Several held distinguished positions in the broader life of American Orthodoxy: Protopresbyter Peter G. Kohanik, who would spend 44 years as founding rector of St. John the Baptist in Passaic; Mitred Archpriest Joseph O. Dzvonchik, Vice President and Secretary of the Metropolitan Council; and Archpriest Michael Chervinsky, who physically held the bishop's residence against police and lawyers during the 1925 cathedral dispute in New York. These men maintained the community during its first decade on Grand Street.

The third permanent rector, Very Rev. John J. Adamiak, shaped the interior of the church that visitors see today. Born in 1889 in Mayfield, Pennsylvania, he had been sent to seminary in Russia at age fourteen, hand-selected by Bishop Tikhon, the future Patriarch of Moscow. He returned to complete his training in Minneapolis and was ordained in 1911 as one of the first American-born Orthodox priests. He arrived at Saints Peter and Paul in 1920 and remained for twenty years, serving concurrently as Dean of all Orthodox parishes in New Jersey for most of that tenure.

His successor, Very Rev. Michael G. Dziama, held both a law degree and priestly rank, serving as Legal Advisor to the Metropolitan Council of the Russian Orthodox Church in America. He arrived in February 1941 and made short work of what remained: on a Sunday in May 1943, the mortgage was burned ceremonially in the church hall before the entire congregation. Father Dziama died in office on September 5, 1944, at forty-nine. His daughter later endowed the Very Rev. Michael and Matushka Anna Dziama Scholarship Fund at Saint Vladimir's Orthodox Theological Seminary, where it supports the training of Orthodox clergy still.

Archpriest John Skvir served from 1952 to 1987, the longest rectorship in the parish's history at thirty-five years. His tenure encompassed the granting of autocephaly to the Orthodox Church in America in 1970, the moment when the North American Church received full canonical self-governance from the Moscow Patriarchate, fulfilling the vision that men like Nemolovsky had worked toward decades before. The acquisition of additional properties on Grand Street, including the purchase of the vacant lot at 101 Grand Street from the City of Jersey City, took place during this era of stability and growth.

The church's physical presence on Grand Street continued to deepen. In 1960, the present rectory at 107 Grand Street, designed by architect Maurice Kraut, replaced the 1916 structure. In 1965, teak doors with a carved Orthodox cross were imported from Hong Kong and installed at the main entrance, their warm wood joining the sandstone facade and copper domes as part of what this building had become. The original Gothic arches and poured-cement columns remained inside, framing the murals and the chandelier exactly as Adamiak and Bodasiuk had arranged them.