This is perhaps the last architectural commission completed by Alpheus C. Morse, but it clearly shows that, even at the age of seventy-two, an old dog could learn new tricks. The low-slung massing and high roof of this church very much recall the overall form that H.H. Richardson gave to Pittsburgh’s Emmanuel Episcopal Church (1886), known colloquially there as the “brick-oven church.” Morse also borrowed some of the Romanesque-inspired detail that Richardson had favored, such as in the Emmanuel Church, before the abstraction of his late work. As a bellwether for social history, this building is particularly telling: first the religious home for white Episcopalians, then African-Americans as Church of the Saviour, and since 1940 one of the city’s two Armenian churches.
– 2003 Guide to Providence Architecture
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