Ebenezer Chapel

A pentecostal church on Dwight Street, Ebenezer Chapel is an Italianate and Georgian-style building on the outskirts of New Haven’s Chapel West  area serving the New Haven population. The limestone brick facade, the two symmetrical towers, and the warm orange doors evoke an image of the Italianate villa even as its three arched doorways and long, thin windows allude to Gothic revival forms. Before being bought by Ebenezer Chapel Inc. in 1985, the building was originally named St. Barbara’s Greek Orthodox Church and served New Haven’s Greek population for about 40 years.

The building was constructed in 1941, so it did not exist in the 1901 Sanborn map. What was there instead was a row of wooden residential houses that were mostly cleared to make room for the church. There was one house left untouched, which has been the Parish House for both incarnations of the church and is still standing to this day. The eliminating of several houses except for one (and incorporating it as the church’s parish house) may account for why the church’s address is so variable. The tax assessor’s office has the chapel under 48 Dwight Street, but the owner has it under 56 Dwight Street. However, Google Maps and the Ebenezer Chapel Website list the address as 50 Dwight Street.

At its time of construction in 1941, the building was originally named St. Barbara’s Greek Orthodox Church. It was paid for completely by New Haven’s Greek immigrant population through donations ranging from $125 to $1500 after the previous Greek Orthodox church on Beers Street had been ravaged by a fire. The new church on Dwight Street became a symbol of optimism; of a phoenix rising from the ashes. Due to the reason the new church was constructed and the “crowd-sourcing” process by which it was funded, the structure became a powerful symbol of Greek solidarity and community in the city. The building cost about $60,000 to build and was consecrated the next year on Easter Sunday of 1942.

For over 40 years, the church served uninterrupted until it was sold to Ebenezer Chapel Inc. in 1985. The members of the church had split into two factions, and ended up in court. When the church was sold and changed its designation from Orthodox to Pentecostal, most of the congregation moved to Orange, CT. The ones who stayed rented space in the Center Church on the Green for a short time. It was not until September 2017 that the New Haven Greek population established an Orthodox place of worship in founding St. Basil’s Greek Orthodox Church in Elm City.  

Ebenezer Chapel now has a pentecostal congregation and serves primarily African Americans in the New Haven area both through its Sunday sermons and through its Sunday School and charity work in the community.

The church is located in a residential street just out of reach from Yale’s downtown radius, in the outskirts of New Haven’s Chapel West area. It is surrounded by wooden frame houses and apartment buildings home to Yale students as well as native New Haven residents.

The church’s masonry frame supports a limestone brick and grey stone facade, evoking Italianate, Georgian, and Gothic styles. The symmetrical towers and three arches in the middle speak to the American cities’ language of power and monumentalism through Georgian Neoclassical forms, a sense of grandeur amplified by the broad staircase prefacing the structure. Yet, the towers’ low-pitched, hipped roofs and the doors’ warm orange color evoke a lighthearted Italianate style that makes the building elegantly pop during sunnier days. To complement the church’s grandeur aesthetic, there are in the building’s narrowly arched windows and generally darker stone pediments remnants of a Neo-gothic style, giving the church a more imposing and almost menacing texture during grayer or darker days.

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