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Second Baptist Church of St. Louis was founded in 1833 but traces its origins to the First Baptist Church founded in 1818. Second Baptist has had five homes, each a notable design of its era. The fourth was the monumental Italian Gothic complex at Kingshighway and Washington built in 1908 and now part of the "Holy Corners" historic district. The present building is, by contrast, so restrained externally as to be almost invisible. Its achievement is its interior, a memorable environment created out of the simplest modern elements, brick, glass, and birch. Frederick Dunn (1905-1984), who designed it in 1956, was then in the midst of his second architectural career. His first had begun in 1936, when the Minnesota native came to St. Louis to form a partnership with Charles Nagel, whom he had met at Yale. The work of Nagel & Dunn, which struck contemporaries as daringly modern, was always grounded in traditional styles, particularly late Georgian, and today compares favorably with the best of the post-modern movement. Their most acclaimed work was St. Mark’s (Episcopal) Church on Clifton Avenue near Nottingham, today designated a St. Louis landmark. After serving in the war, Nagel became a successful museum director, while Dunn embraced the International Style, practicing at first on his own and later in partnership with the younger Nolan Stinson; Dunn himself moved to New York in 1963. Their design for the National Council of State Garden Clubs, located on Magnolia Avenue in Shaw’s Garden, recently received a 25-year award from the American Institute of Architects. It uses the same soft pink "Chicago common" brick seen here.
The nine windows were painted in enamel, rather than pieced, by St. Louis artist Siegfried Reinhardt and executed by Emil Frei. They represent the Sermon on the Mount and the Beatitudes. Associated with these themes are four aspects of Jesus and other biblical images, including Job’s sufferings, Paul’s conversion, the Good Samaritan, and the parable of the Pharisee and the Publican.
The Chamber Chorus sang its Scandinavian Christmas program here, December 21 and 22, 1996, and subsequently recorded its fourth compact disc from the choir gallery, A Spanish Christmas.
The church house, which is more visible than the church, was built about 1868 by a dentist, Henry Barron and his wife Elizabeth McCutchan, on part of her family’s estate. They lost it to foreclosure in 1876, and a later owner, Dr. Wilbur Carpenter of the Bryant & Stratton Business College, suffered the same fate in 1915. The Ionic portico, which obscures the original Italianate style of the house, was added about 1920 for Levi Wade Childress, president of the Columbia Transfer Company and Laclede Gas.
Notes by Esley Hamilton and Philip Barnes