Daily News: Inwood Chapel

Mormons Building Chapel & Support In N. Manhattan
(by Juan Gonzalez; published Daily News, Friday, March 17, 2000)

People in the Inwood section of northern Manhattan are not accustomed to seeing a marvelous new building spring up in the middle of their neighborhood.

Oh sure, every few years the city erects a new public school in the area, but the idiots over at the School Construction Authority take so long to finish even the tiniest project - and they usually foul up the work so royally - that the average new school is old and stinks of scandal before the first pupil walks in the door.

Imagine, then, the curiosity around Dyckman St. and Broadway the past year as neighbors watched work crews make steady progress on a mysterious building across the street from Fort Tryon Park.

"I've been in this neighborhood 27 years and never seen anything like it," said Bob Tortorello, who runs Broadyke meat store on Broadway.

When it is completed later this month, the building will be the first Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints chapel to be constructed in Manhattan in a quarter-century. It will measure nearly seven stories to the top of its steeple.

At that height, it will rise above most buildings on the surrounding streets. Its facade of intricate stone and brick, together with the meticulously landscaped sidewalks that church architects have planned around it, will turn the chapel into the chief attraction in the neighborhood.

The building includes not only two dozen luxurious classrooms and a large basement parking garage, but a sparkling new hardwood basketball court at the back of the 200-seat chapel.

The Mormons in the New York metropolitan area, who number about 24,000, also sponsor basketball teams in their congregations (or wards) as a means of keeping the faithful happy.

In northern Manhattan, that is definitely a winning strategy.

Call it slam-dunk salvation.

"We're very pleased with how the chapel has turned out," said Mormon spokesman Richard Hedberg.

So what are the Mormons, members of a church that only began admitting blacks to its ranks a few decades ago, doing in Washington Heights-Inwood, you ask?

Maybe returning to some of their roots.

After all, it was nearly 170 years ago, on April 6, 1830, that Joseph Smith, the first Mormon prophet, founded the church in upstate Palmyra.

But the Mormons, as they came to be known, kept moving west and eventually, after Smith was assassinated, settled in Utah under the leadership of Brigham Young, where they could practice their religion - including polygamy - free from interference from government or other churches.

Church elders, however, have not been content to stay in Utah. During the past decades, Mormon membership has exploded, thanks to a practice of sending as many as 60,000 missionaries - most of them fresh-faced, crew-cut young males - to the farthest reaches of the world.

About 75 missionaries are working Manhattan's streets today.

Of the more than 10 million Mormons in the world, half live outside the United States, and 30% are in Latin America.

Latin America, as one Mormon spokesman explained to me, has always had special importance to the church. According to the Book of the Mormon, one of the prophets of antiquity led a tribe out of Jerusalem in 600 B.C., and those followers boarded a ship to America. After Jesus of Nazareth was crucified, he appeared among those early Native Americans.

While the Mormons have never quite identified which early Americans those were, church scholars have spent many years tracking down family genealogies in that part of the world. Today, the Mormons, who believe that family ties remain even in the afterlife, have compiled the largest genealogical database in the world.

Presumably, that lost tribe could have been the ancestors of the Tainos of the Dominican Republic or the Aztecs of central Mexico.

No matter where the tribe ended up, Latin Americans continue to be big for the Mormons. So many have joined the church in northern Manhattan, said Brent Belnap, who supervises church activities in the borough, that the area "almost has a Utah feel to it."

New York Daily News: Mormons Building Chapel