Welcome back to Center City! It may be hard to believe, but this our first visit to the area in seven months. SEVEN! We haven’t been here since our trip to the excellent St. John the Evangelist in June, when the Project was clad in holy churchgoing shorts.
St. Augustine is one of the oldest parishes in Philadelphia, with its 1796 founding date far outdistancing anything we’ve seen so far. It’s so old that the sometimes gets the title “Old St. Augustine,” putting it in a select class of churches that includes Old St. Joseph’s, Old St. Mary’s, and Old St. Michael’s.
Old vs. Older Churches: Remember this one? One of our earliest theorems, Old vs. Older Churches points that old churches are great, but churches can be TOO old to be particularly grandiose or ornate. In this area, anything built before the mid-1800s can be a crapshoot.
Augustine, rebuilt in 1848, squeaks by into the “older” category, and there are traces of that all over its construction, from the generally unassuming brick exterior to the smaller size.
However, Augustine belies the trend by actually being pretty nice. It's an Italian-Renaissance variant, so we get a non-cruciform building with a flat, decorated roof and circular window arches. Like St. Michael, it also has an enormous balcony that starts at the back and stretches along the sides to the front. The balcony cleaves the church in half, horizontally, so there are actually two sets of the stained glass windows along the sides, one below and one above the balcony. Unfortunately most of them are of the pattern style, rather than the pictorial style.
Still, there's more to like than dislike. Augustine features marvelous mural work, particularly on the roof and on the top sides, and solid marble work in and around the sanctuary. There’s also an impressive foyer that’s notable on two fonts—first, unlike most churches, it’s treated like a part of the interior, so it’s just as ornate as other parts. And second, it’s lower than the church. The foyer is on one level, but you need to take another set of stairs to go up into the church. This is only the second appearance of such a feature. (The first? St. Laurentius.)
MEDIA MATTERS: In "The Sixth Sense," St. Augustine is the church where Bruce Willis' and Haley Joel Osment's characters meet for the first time.
It’s not the biggest or most ornate, but it’s still a very lovely building—particularly if you like more of a colonial-esque tone to your church construction.
Size Rating: 7 out of 10
Ornamentation Rating: 7.5 out of 10
Overall Design Rating: 7.5 out of 10 crosses
