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Puritan in Spanish Garb

Plymouth Congregational Church, Coconut Grove, Miami

The traveller passing down Devon Road in the Grove neighbourhood of Miami might be forgiven for thinking he had stumbled across one of the ancient mission churches that Spanish antecedents had established across the American realms of His Most Catholic Majesty the King of Spain.

The traveller would be mistaken, for what he has discovered is in fact the Plymouth Congregational Church.

It was completed in 1917 by one man Felix Rebom — to a design by architect Clinton MacKenzie. According to local lore, Rebom finished the building himself using just a T-square, a plumbline, a trowel, and a hatchet.

The congregation was founded in 1897 and four years later appointed as its pastor the Rev. Solomon G. Merrick — father of the developer George Merrick who built Coral Gables.

In one of the seemingly endless series of Florida property booms, the elder Merrick’s successor encouraged the congregation to buy a large parcel of land in Coconut Grove.

Dividing it into residential plots allowed them to raise the money to build the new church on the remaining part of the land.

The massive door — hand-carved walnut backed in oak — is in fact four centuries old and comes from a disused Pyrenean monastery.

Architecturally one of the few hints that this is delightful theatre rather than historic reality is that the style, while Spanish, is more Mexican than Floridian.

Florida’s lush climate also means half the building has been taken over by surrounding greenery. I love it.


Image: source.
Published at 10:30 am on Monday 31 October 2022. Categories: Architecture Tags: .
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