Afterlife Hard for Once-Grand Church
By KEVIN COYNE
December 9, 2007

AFTER a long time away, the Rev. Robert Castle visited his old church last year — St. John’s Episcopal, the hilltop Gothic with a panoramic view out over the world he did his best to change in the 1960s — and the state of its decline left him thinking of another sublime fortress once also thought to be impregnable.

“It was like the Titanic going down, and it was sad to see,” said Father Castle, who was rector at St. John’s from 1960 to 1968. “It’s been almost 40 years, and my heart still aches over that church.”

Other hearts have also been aching over St. John’s, a grand but moldering granite church in the Bergen Hill neighborhood that is at the center of perhaps the only ecclesiastical preservation battle that features cameo appearances by the Black Panthers and a Hollywood filmmaker. the rest