Church of St. Martin-in-the-Fields

Community Profile

From its founding St. Martin’s has been identified with its neighborhood, Chestnut Hill. Beginning in the 1890s, developer Henry Houston built the church in tandem with his construction of much of the housing in its vicinity, creating an early example of a “planned community,” a pleasant “suburb” within the greater metropolitan area of Philadelphia.

Chestnut Hill remains an upscale community, with a mixture of large and small single-family houses, twin houses, innovative early 1900s constructions of four-family dwellings with shared green space, apartment houses and estates. Its main street encompasses an attractive business district with many small businesses, restaurants, and banks. Two rail lines connect Chestnut Hill to Center City, the Main Line suburbs, and Trenton. The town is now essentially a prosperous, older suburb within the city limits of Philadelphia. It is by no means inhabited solely by the well-off, yet incomes and property values are in the metropolitan area’s top percentiles. Chestnut Hill has a college, parochial, public, and private schools. The local hospital is run under the auspices of the University of Pennsylvania, and the area includes an art museum, galleries, a library, and the nearby 92-acre Morris Arboretum.

The population of the near neighborhood is mostly Caucasian, with professional occupations dominant. There is a robust, sometimes fractious, level of civic engagement in Chestnut Hill; politically it is more liberal than its demographics might suggest, though somewhat more politically diverse than the city as a whole.

Chestnut Hill was named a 2010 Distinctive Destination by the National Trust for Historic Preservation, and Mt. Airy was named a 2010 Best Old House Neighborhood by This Old House magazine.

To the southeast, Chestnut Hill abuts the middle-class neighborhood of Mount Airy, home to a significant number of parishioners. Mount Airy takes pride in its status as one of the country’s most successful racially integrated neighborhoods, with a high proportion of academics and social services professionals in its occupational ranks.

To the northwest, across the city limits, are several inner-ring suburbs, which are tied commercially and socially to this corner of the city. Many parishioners also reside in this area.

Philadelphia itself is a vibrant city of 1.5 million people, center of a metropolitan area of 5.83 million. The city’s long history is inextricably entwined with the nation’s founding, and much of the 18th-century city still stands. Philadelphia has faced the struggles and challenges of many port and industrial cities in the Northeast. The business climate is stable, even in current economic times. Its population is now about 47 percent Caucasian, 44 percent African American and 9 percent Hispanic. Philadelphia has many academic institutions, including a number of professional schools within the city, along with nationally renowned museums, art galleries, theaters, and concert halls. Conceived by William Penn as a “Greene Countrie Towne,” it was planned around five public squares, four of which still exist as tree-shaded parks within the highly urban environment of Center City. Fairmount Park, one of the largest municipal parks in the country, extends from Center City to Chestnut Hill and offers miles of recreational activities to people throughout the Delaware Valley area.

Though Philadelphia was originally a Quaker city, much Episcopal Church history has occurred here. Christ Church, founded in 1695, was the first parish of the Church of England in Pennsylvania. It played an important role in the establishment of the Episcopal Church in the newly formed United States. William White, joint rector of Christ Church and St. Peter’s, became the first presiding bishop. A century after Christ Church’s founding, Absalom Jones opened the African Episcopal Church of St. Thomas, the first black church in Philadelphia. He was ordained as a priest in 1804, the first African American priest in the Episcopal Church. One hundred seventy years later, the first women priests were ordained in Philadelphia at the Church of the Advocate. None of these events was without tension, and there are certainly still strains within the diocese. Yet there is a strong commitment to “labor on.” As Bishop Rodney Michel said in his speech at the most recent diocesan convention, “The church is not a resort for saints, it is an arena of reconciliation for all of God's people.”