Saint Clement's Church is an historic Anglo-Catholic parish in Logan Square, Center City, Philadelphia. It is part of the Episcopal Diocese of Pennsylvania. The church, designed by architect John Notman, was built in 1856. It originally incorporated a spire more than tall; this was found to be too heavy for the foundation and was removed in 1869. In 1929, the church building, which includes the parish house and rectory, and weighs 5000 tons, was lifted onto steel rollers and moved forty feet west to allow for the widening of 20th Street. On November 20, 1970, Saint Clement's Church was listed on the National Register of Historic Places.
History
On September 13, 1855, a charter was granted to "The Rector, Churchwardens, and Vestrymen of St. Clement's Church in the City of Philadelphia". The first rector was the Rev. Henry S. Spackman, who was elected as soon as the first charter was received. His incumbency began officially on January 1, 1856. The cornerstone of the church building was laid on May 12, 1856, by the Rt. Rev. Alonzo Potter, third Bishop of the Diocese of Pennsylvania.
The land on which St. Clement's was built was furnished by William S. Wilson, a Presbyterian and an Englishman, who with his two brothers came to this country and made a fortune as a manufacturer. He owned most of the land in the section of the city where St. Clement's now stands, and his interest was directed to the development of a residential area by building row houses on Arch, Race and Twentieth Streets. He was eager that a church should be built, not so much because of any religious devotion on his part, but because he felt the erection of a church would greatly enhance the attractiveness of his residential projects.
St. Clement's was the third Episcopal church to be designed by architect John Notman and built in Philadelphia between 1847 and 1859. He also designed St. Mark's Church on Locust Street, the Church of the Holy Trinity on Rittenhouse Square and, with Napoleon Le Brun, was associate architect for the Roman Catholic Cathedral of SS. Peter and Paul on Logan Square. In accordance with the architectural wisdom of the time, Notman maintained that the Gothic Revival style was best suited towards the liturgical worship of High Church congregations, while Romanesque Revival architecture was better suited for the conventional Low Church worship of mainstream Episcopal congregations. Unlike St Mark's, which was erected for a High Church congregation and built in the Gothic Revival style, St. Clement's was originally designed for a typical Low Church Episcopal congregation, and like the Church of the Holy Trinity, was designed in the Romanesque Revival style. Like its two nearby sisters, St. Clement's was built entirely of brownstone. Its bell tower was originally topped by an impressive spire of over 200 feet in height. The weight of the spire was more than the foundation could support, and it was removed from the structure in 1869 in order to prevent damaging the foundation.
When the cornerstone was laid St. Clement's was almost in the fields. The block between Arch and Race Streets had been, from about 1808 into the 1830s, the site of Sans Souci Garden, the largest for-profit botanical haven within the current-day confines of Center City. It had boasted a fine hotel at which visitors were furnished with fruit from the garden greenhouses as part of their refreshments. The garden was respected for its botanical collection; a portion of William Hamilton's private collection—developed at the Woodlands in West Philadelphia—wound up there. The resort was also immediately south of the Magdalene Asylum (a private charitable organization for the redemption of prostitutes) and the Pennsylvania Asylum for the Blind—illustrating how such institutions were established outside of the populated sectors of the city.
In the mid-1850s, few houses yet existed nearby and large tracts of open lots surrounded the ground that had been secured for the church. The grid of streets had hardly expanded westward as far as 20th Street and there was no City Hall in the Center Square. The Pennsylvania Railroad Terminal was located at 11th and Market Streets, and there was a covered wooden bridge over the Schuylkill River.