Greater Mount Moriah

This "Church Sunday" at Newark USA I show pix of Greater Mount Moriah Baptist Church Inc. in the Central Ward, at Clinton Avenue and Wright Street (210 Clinton Avenue, Newark, NJ 07108; (973) 824-1804). I see no website for that church, nor for a Community Development organization of the same name at 202 Clinton.

View from Wright Street.

I did find services to be held at the Church this coming Tuesday, the 19th, for Jeremiah Chester London, aged 64. He was exactly one year older than I am. Hm. I do not, however, know anything more about him.

I also found a website about a Virginia designer of stained glass, Ronald Neill Dixon, who lists Greater Mount Moriah as one of many churches in which his stained-glass windows are installed. A webpage about costs asks cutely, "How Much is That Angel in the Window?" Younger people may or may not know the reference* to the 1952 song, "How much is that doggie in the window?"

Mount Moriah is undergoing renovations. Thus the draped fabric over the tower in most of these fotos. There have already been some renovations, as to add a ramp for the disabled. Not all older churches have such a thing. The architecture of this particular building seems to have lent itself to the addition of a ramp.

As so often happens, this church is across the street from another church, the Greater Harvest Evangelistic Church of God in Christ.
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* I don't know how much kids today know about the past, which gets to the larger question of how much of any generation's experience remains in the popular culture, and for how long. For instance, "hot" meant, for a while, what later was termed "cool". "Cool" has prevailed in that sense since at least the 1950s. In the same way, "hep" became "hip" in the mid-1940s and remains so today. How far back anything goes, and how long it is remembered in the popular culture is a field of endless study for cultural anthropologists. I have a theory, for instance, that the mocking, sing-song taunt "Nyaa nyaa, nya nyaa nyaa" (or "Nah nah na nah nah" in some communities) derives from Anglo-Saxon children making fun of the nasal speech of French kids in England when English rebounded from being practically extinguished during the dominance of Norman French after the Conquest of 1066. In that there is no agreed way to spell such sounds, it is impossible to find whether this issue has been examined and pronounced upon definitively. This is another reason I am a spelling reformer, because with an agreed phonetic spelling, we COULD approach Google or Wikipedia with such search terms. As it is, you can find lots of websites with variants of these two spellings, but cannot readily find the history nor origin of the term. So my theory sounds good to me.