The Choral Society of the Hamptons draws singers from
East Hampton, Southampton, Shelter Island, Southold, Riverhead, Amagansett, Bridgehampton, Montauk, Sag Harbor, Wainscott, Water Mill, North Fork.
Top soloist and instrumentalist will join us from New York City and the Greater New York area.
Copyright 2009 Choral Society of the Hamptons all rights reserved
Venues
The Old Whalers Church
The following quotes were taken from pieces written by Berton Roueché, which appeared in The New Yorker between 1946 and 1953: “The Whalers Church… is [Sag Harbor’s] noblest … structure. It would be arresting anywhere. Except for a mean and slovenly copy in Essex, Connecticut, it is the only building of its kind in the world.
“The Whalers Church was designed by Minard Lafever, a gifted and expensive New York architect, whose more accessible works include the Church of St. James, near Chatham Square [in New York City] and the Church of the Holy Trinity, in Brooklyn, and it was put together by local shipbuilders and ships’ carpenters. The foundation was laid in the spring of 1843 and the church was dedicated on May 16, 1844.
“Its façade is predominantly Babylonian and Theban Egyptian in style. The auditorium – of clapboard, slate-roofed, boxy and severe, is pure meeting-house Colonial. [Entering the auditorium,] “we stepped into a silent immensity of whiteness. Two steeply inclined overhanging galleries, faced with an intricate frieze of carved volutes and rosettes, ran the length of the side walls. Behind each of them was a row of tall, tinted windows, ablaze with frosty lavender light. ... I said, quite truthfully, that I’d never seen a more handsome room.”
The Church before the steeple was blown off by the hurricane of 1938 - Collection of Joy Lewis