Architecture
St. Mary's Abbey Church is notable for its architecture and has been listened on the National Register of Historic Places since 1972. [23]
When the present church was completed in 1857, the exterior was entirely red brick, and the basilica-style interior could seat 1,000 people. Oriented with a semi-domed apse facing the east, the central nave of the church was straight and rectangular, with smaller side-aisles on either side. All the walls were painted white, and the lower walls contained five clear glass windows on both the north and south walls; the upper walls contained ten pairs of smaller windows with semi-circular tops. Thick walls and exterior buttresses supported most of the weight of the building and ten iron pillars within the nave formed the bases of a dozen arches that rose to support the upper wall. Stylized pillar-like features appeared on the east wall, forming the base of a semi-circular arch over the main marble altar in the sanctuary, as well two other arches over the deep-set alcoves containing two side altars. [24]
The oral history of the parish long held that there was no architect for the 1857 church and that instead, the Benedictines had given a group of parishioners a selection of pre-existing churches from which to choose a model, with the committee selecting St. Boniface Abbey in Munich.[4] Later, historians have credited the famed church architect Patrick Keely as the architect of St. Mary’s, but recent scholarship by Augustine Curley, O.S.B. has uncovered that the actual architect was Henry Engelbert, a German-American architect most well-known for designing New York’s Grand Hotel. [25] Engelbert's design is Rundbogenstil , a distinctively German style popular in Bavaria in the early modern period, characterized by basilica-style naves, semicircular apses, rounded arches with weight-bearing pillars, the incorporation of iron, and decorative murals.
To top off the impressive structure, a six-story high, 125-foot campanile rose from the southwest corner of the church, towering over the nave and over the city of Newark itself. Geographically, St. Mary’s is at the top of a relatively step hill overlooking the downtown commercial district. At the time of the church’s completion in 1857, the 125-foot campanile of St. Mary’s was most likely the tallest structure in the city, and which the help of the local geography, it certainly would have been the most prominent feature of the still steeple-dominated Newark skyline.
The interior decoration of the church was carried out by Br. Cosmas Wolf, O.S.B. and was not completed until over a decade after the church building itself was finished. Upon completion, the sanctuary was full of statuary, with the Virgin Mary, Isaiah, David, and John the Apostle appearing on the high altar, flanked by Ss. Benedict and Boniface. William Lamprecht was hired to paint murals on the interior walls, completing an 11-image cycle of scenes from the life of St. Mary, culminating in the Crowning of Mary as Queen of Heaven high above the apse.
Interior decoration in the church would continue in the following decades. In 1890, the first stained-glass window appeared: a miter within a six-pointed star on the western, street-facing façade of the church, a celebration of the elevation of the parish to an abbey church in 1884. Further decorations were added in 1907: round murals depicting saints and scenes from the life of St. Benedict on the ceiling above the side aisles as well as stained glass windows from Munich.
In 1958, Prior Martin Burne, O.S.B. relocated the choir stalls from the third-floor chapel of the adjoining monastery into the sanctuary of St. Mary’s, marking the first time that the Divine Office was celebrated in the church on a daily basis.
A complete remodeling of the church interior, including the construction of a brand-new altar, ambo, and other furnishings, followed in 1986.
