New Old South Church (1875)
Boston’s New Old South Church, on Boylston Street, is located off Copley Square, not far from Trinity Church, and was built in 1874-5. At that time, the congregation moved from its famous eighteenth century meetinghouse. Designed in a Venetian or Northern Italian Gothic style by Charles Cummings, based on the High Victorian Gothic ideas of John Ruskin, the church makes a strong architectural statement on its prominent corner location, contrasting with the neoclassical Boston Public Library across the street. John Evans, a sculptor from Scotland, carved the exterior sculpture of both New Old South and Trinity churches. The original tower began to lean and was removed in 1931, eventually being replaced by a newer and shorter tower in 1941.
Pictures of the original tower make the whole thing seem much more Ruskinian. The lantern shape in the original projected farther out from the tower’s walls. It is fortunate that the church rebuilt the tower as late as 1940, when Ruskin gothic may have seemed very antiquated, but it’s not as atmospheric as the original.