Once called the "richest Negro church in America," St. Philip's Episcopal Church is also one of the oldest black congregations in New York. The church was organized in 1818 by, among others, Peter Williams Jr., a passionate political activist, and abolitionist. Many of the parishioners of St. Philip's were members of New York's extremely small nineteenth-century black elite.

Located since 1886 in the infamous Tenderloin neighborhood on the middle west side of Manhattan, St. Philip's acquired a new church site on the south side of West 134th Street near Seventh Avenue in 1909. (The church also purchased ten apartment houses on West 135th Street that had previously been restricted to whites. When the congregation began its move to Harlem, St. Philip's evicted the white tenants and made the apartments available to blacks. For half a century, rent from those apartments subsidized the St. Philip's endowment).

One of the architects of the church, which opened in 1911, was Vertner Woodson Tandy, the first black architect registered in New York and designer of Madam C. J. Walker's townhouse/hair parlor.