File:Community Worship Center Bedford & Madison jeh.jpg

English: Community Worship Center, 1160 Bedford Avenue at Madison Street, Brooklyn, September 2017. The building was constructed as home of the East Reformed Church, a congregation whose history traces back to 1853 and whose original church was found some blocks south of here near the corner of Bedford and Fulton Avenues. After the Civil War and with the ensuing growth and urbanization of Brooklyn, the congregation began to increase explosively in size: it's recorded that 150 new members had joined in the four months prior to the March 1872 groundbreaking for the building seen here. Architect John Welch, a local practitioner well known as a designer of fine churches, furnished a Victorian Gothic blueprint that was lauded in contemporaneous news coverage as having "a rich appearance without bring gaudy". The large stained-glass window facing Madison Avenue is bedecked with fine tracery wherein trefoil patterns are a frequently recurring trope, and the corner spire where the main entrance is found stands 160 feet above street level and sports an open-work belfry at its top. Notable also are the color contrasts on the façade, where ruddy Philadelphia pressed brick is offset by light-colored stone trim. The Rev. Dr. J. Halstead Carroll, newly installed as pastor, presided over the dedication ceremony in April 1873 but ultimately proved a less than capable administrator: the parish soon fell behind in repaying the $150,000 construction debt, and finally defaulted on the mortgage in 1887. The building's next owner, the Aurora Grata Scottish Rite Masonic Lodge #756, purchased the property for just one-third of its assessed value and immediately set about converting it into one of the poshest Masonic temples in Brooklyn: the interior of the so-called Aurora Grata Cathedral was bedecked with (in the words of a recent Brownstoner write-up) "thick carpets, woodwork for days, comfortable lounging furniture, fine artwork, Turkish furnishings; the whole deal". The Masons retained ownership of the building at least through the 1930s but, increasingly as the years wore on and their need for space diminished, rented it out on short-term leases to a parade of religious congregations lacking their own homes. Since then, it has mostly reverted to religious use. The Community Worship Center of the Church of the Nazarene, its current owner, is a nondenominational congregation that's been headquartered in the building since 1985.