View of 153 West 105th Street from south. Image courtesy of the NYC Municipal Archives.
Saint Gerasimos Greek Orthodox Church
153 West 105th Street
by Tom Miller
Born on the island of Karpathos, Greece, on October 15, 1901, John M. Kokkins’s future as a Manhattan architect would have seemed out of touch to his family and neighbors. He left Greece by sailboat in 1918, traveling to Rhodes and Athens before landing at Ellis Island in 1921. Kokkins worked as a waiter at the Hotel Astor while attending the McBurney YMCA School. After having learned English and becoming a U.S. citizen, he received his bachelor’s degree in architecture from Columbia in 1930.
Following World War II, Kokkins became the architect for the American Friends of Greece, which erected medical buildings there. He partnered with Stephen C. Lyras to form the firm Kokkins & Lyras, which specialized in high-end apartment buildings in areas like Sutton Place and Park Avenue.
The firm diverted from its normal commissions in 1949, when (no doubt because of Kokkins’s Greek roots and connections)
The firm diverted from its normal commissions in 1949, when (no doubt because of Kokkins’s Greek roots and connections) it was hired to design Saint Gerasimos Greek Orthodox Church at 153-155 West 105th Street. The congregation, founded in 1926, had been sharing the nearby Grace United Methodist Church on West 104th Street.
Completed in 1951, the church was designed in what one architectural historian has called the “Postwar Romanesque Revival” style. A broad set of stone steps leads to the centered entrance below a large stained-glass window. Four pairs of monumental, engaged columns support the entablature above which undecorated brown brick rises to a peaked gable.
On October 22, 1951, The New York Times published a one-line article: “Archbishop Michael, primate of the Greek Orthodox Church of North and South America, consecrated a new edifice for the Church of St. Gerasimos, 153 West 105th Street, yesterday morning.”
the church was designed in what one architectural historian has called the “Postwar Romanesque Revival” style.
As it had done since its founding, the church continued to serve as a religious and cultural center for Greek-American residents of the Upper West Side. Perhaps the one blot in its history came on November 5, 1987, when the pastor of St. Gerasimos, the Rev. Eleftherios Stavrakis, was arrested by the Government as “the central figure” in a 47-person ring charged “with bribing undercover federal agents with a total of $522,000 to cheat the Internal Revenue Service out of $2.3 million,” as reported by The New York Times.
Kikkins & Lyras’s unassuming and dignified structure, reminiscent of religious architecture of the Greek Islands, is a striking presence on the 105th Street block. The church continues to be a central part of the Upper West Side Greek community.
Tom Miller is a social historian and blogger at daytoninmanhattan.blogspot.com
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