Russian Orthodox Churches in Manhattan

There are just a couple of Russian Orthodox Churches in Manhattan that I am aware of, and they are very different.  I am using my photo of this church...

The Church of Christ the Savior is a modest place on East 71st Street over towards York Avenue..Its website says

The CURCH OF CHRIST THE SAVIOR is a parish of the Orthodox Church in America, diocese of New York. It was founded in 1924 by Russian immigrants (History of the parish)

Our website is a testimony about the Gospel of our Lord through the ecclesiastical life of our community. Here you will find a concise history of our parish, information about important events in its life, a short summary of the history of Orthodoxy in America, as well as articles about various aspects of Orthodoxy.
In American Orthodoxy, lay people have always played an important role, complementing the service of the Church hierarchy, and our parish is not an exception. We know that the Orthodox Church lives by its communion with its Lord and Chief Jesus Christ, who has said unto His disciples: “I am the vine and ye are the branches... As the branch cannot bear fruit of itself, except it abide in the vine; no more can ye, except ye abide in me” (John 15:4-5). And so we, who partake of Our Lord, constitute together one body, according to the apostle's words, “for the body is not one member, but many” (1 Cor. 12:14). Thus our web page narrates not only the events of the parish's life as such, but also tells what is most important in the everyday life of some of our parishioner and introduces visitors to their creative works.

ON THE OTHER HAND....

St. Nicholas Orthodox Russian Church is on a much grander scale. I used to have a very nice photo of it which of course has been lost, so I got this ( at end of article) from Flickr... and the icon also from the net.

I remember that the St. Nicholas church got going with a gift from the Tsar and was built to look in fact like a replica of a church in Russia...here is some more from the net:

A community of Orthodox believers established the Church of St. Nicholas in the early 1890s in rented rooms in lower Manhattan in New York City. As the congregation grew to some 300 parishioners in 1899, a movement began to build a new, larger church. A location in an inexpensive part of uptown Manhattan at 15 East 97th Street between Fifth and Madison Avenues was purchased. Donations by Tsar Nicholas II of 7,500 rubles were among the first donations made for the construction of the new church. On May 22, 1901, Bishop Tikhon of the Aleutians and North America laid the cornerstone of the temple.

The design, by John Bergesen, was of a church that followed that of typical Russian churches. The structure was of stone with a dark red brick facade trimmed with limestone and glazed tile in green, blue, and yellow surmounted by seven onion shaped domes. The curving ribs of the domes were of gilt bronze that contrasted with the green painted galvanized iron surface.
The new St. Nicholas Cathedral was completed in 1904 and became the following year, 1905, the seat of the Diocese of the Aleutians and North America after transfer of the church headquarters from San Francisco to New York. Fr. Alexander Hotovitzky, who was pastor of Church of St. Nicholas, continued his pastoral assignment at the cathedral until his return to Russia on February 26, 1914.

After the Bolsheviks assumed power in Russia, Soviet controlled elements of the Church of Russia challenged the missionary diocese that had declared itself temporarily independent in the early 1920s over ownerhip of St Nicholas Cathedral. By New York State Appellate Court action the ownership of the cathedral was awarded to the Bolshevik controlled church, the Living Church, in Russia. Over the following decades the cathedral functioned uneasily as the official church of an atheistic country.
With the fall of the Soviet Union, control of St Nicholas Cathedral passed to the freed Church of Russia under Patriarch Alexei II. Currently, St. Nicholas Cathedral is the seat of the Administrator of the Patriarchal Parishes of the Russian Orthodox Church in the USA, Justinian, Archbishop of Naro-Fominsk, Vicar to His Holiness, Kyrill, Patriarch of Moscow and All Russia.

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