North Woodward Avenue Congregational Church

North Woodward Avenue Congregational Church was built in stages between 1907 and 1929 in the Neo-Gothic style. When the city’s population shifted as a result of the Great Depression of the 1930s and the influx of factory workers during World War II, much of the congregation’s membership left the city. In 1953 it sold this building to St. John’s Christian Methodist Episcopal Church. Organized on July 8, 1917, as St. John’s Colored Methodist Episcopal Church, it was the first church of its denomination in Detroit and had several homes before becoming the first African American congregation to worship in Woodward Avenue’s “Piety Hill.”