The Park Avenue Baptist church relocated to Riverside Drive and Claremont Avenue between west 120th and 122nd streets, one of the highest points in New York, overlooking the Hudson River, became the Riverside Church. This, "the City's greatest skyscraper church" was funded by John D. Rockefeller Jr. and designed by Henry C. Pelton in 1929. The church consists of a 60x 100 ft low vaulted auditorium designed for the best acoustics and visibility for 2,400 worshippers, with a bowling alley, basketball court, theatre, assembly rooms and a kitchen beneath it, and the Laura Spelman Rockefeller Memorial tower based on the façade of Chartes Cathedral. An astonishing 375-ft, it has 21 floors of offices and the largest carillon in the world. Its skyscraper form derived from the competition with commercial and residential towers in the urban fabric due to the rising cost of land as well as the expanded programmatic needs of the church with meeting rooms, classrooms, and social welfare facilities.

"the ecclesiastical monument that best symbolizes an era in which modern commercial and social values continue to find their expression in largely traditional forms."