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Kirkpatrick Chapel In The News
- Baptisms
Kirkpatrick Chapel In The News
Credit: Heather Morrison
WEDDINGS AT KIRKPATRICK: When President Richard L. McCormick and Joan C. Barry were married July 22 in the Kirkpatrick Chapel, the couple followed a storied Rutgers tradition. Kirkpatrick weddings began in the late 1940s at the rate of two or three per year, increasing to 114 last year.
Kirkpatrick Chapel first: Rutgers chief's wedding
Saturday, July 22, 2006
BY KELLY HEYBOER
Star-Ledger Staff
When Rutgers University built Kirkpatrick Chapel in 1873, the hilltop building was designed to serve as both a library and the site of daily worship services for students.
The library has since moved to larger quarters and students are no longer required to attend daily sermons. But Rutgers' aging chapel is still busy, hosting nearly 400 wed dings, baptisms, funerals, concerts and arts performances each year.
"What's nice about this building is it is live and not so sanctimonious," said Patrick Cogan, the New Brunswick chapel's operations manager. "There is always something happening here."
This evening, Kirkpatrick Chapel will host one of the biggest events in its history-- its first-ever wedding of a Rutgers president. Richard McCormick, the university's 19th president, will marry campus fundraiser Joan Barry in front of about 250 guests.
The chapel, located within steps of both the president and his fiancée's offices, was the obvious choice for the ceremony when the couple got engaged in February.
"I can see it out my window," said Barry, a Rutgers graduate and director of principal gifts at the Rutgers Foundation, the university's fundraising arm. "We really wanted a Rutgers wedding and Kirkpatrick Chapel is just such a part of this place."
The Victorian gothic chapel was designed by Henry Janeway Hardenburgh, the great-great-grandson of the first president of Queens College, the New Brunswick school that would eventually become Rutgers.
Hardenburgh went on to become a top architect of luxury hotels. His buildings included the Plaza Hotel in New York and the Dakota Building overlooking Central Park. He also designed several of Rutgers' oldest buildings, including Geology Hall.
Kirkpatrick Chapel was dedicated to Sophia Astley Kirkpatrick, the wife of a Rutgers trustee. Nearly $61,000 from her estate was used to fund the construction.
The building is lined with stained glass windows donated by graduating classes and alumni. Three of the windows were designed by Louis Comfort Tiffany.
The chapel's walls are painted red, a nod to the Rutgers Scarlet Knights' color, and covered with portraits of former Rutgers presidents. The stained glass window over the choir loft depicts William Franklin, son of Benjamin Franklin and former Colonial governor of New Jersey, signing the charter creating the university.
In 2001, Rutgers' Mason Gross School of the Arts took over the chapel. Cogan, a veteran actor who last appeared in the national tour of "The Full Monty," oversees Kirkpatrick and coordinated the hundreds of weddings, Christmas concerts and other events in the space each year.
"It's very much like being a stage manager," he said.
Rutgers advertises the chapel in New Jersey Bride, theknot.com and other wedding sites and magazines. Though the bulk of the ceremonies involve Rutgers alumni, the chapel is beginning to draw a wider crowd.
"Because we're non-denominational, we're very prized," Cogan said. "We welcome all comers."
Kirkpatrick hosts up to 13 ceremonies each weekend and is ac cepting bookings through 2008. The chapel and its red walls are especially popular with Asian families who believe red is a lucky color, Cogan said.
Thanks to the revenue from weddings, funerals and other services, the chapel's $100,000 budget is self-sustaining. Couples pay $600 for a typical wedding service.
But the 650-seat chapel is be ginning to show its age. A recent university assessment found restoring the stained glass windows will cost $1.5 million, campus officials said. The building also needs major updating. It has one small bath room that is not handicapped accessible and no air conditioning, leaving many summer brides sweating at the altar.
There were plans to begin an extensive restoration of the chapel in 2008, but Rutgers' recent budget problems mean the work may be delayed indefinitely.
Campus workers were busy patching the walls inside the church earlier this week in time for the president's wedding. The chapel has been preparing for McCormick's nuptials since February, when Cogan received a cryptic call from the president's office inquiring which dates the space might be free.
The president's assistant "was being very cagey about the whole thing," he said. "She said, in strictest confidence, the president wants to get married."
Cogan ended up rescheduling another couple's wedding rehearsal to make room for McCormick's 6 p.m. wedding, one of four being held in the chapel today.
McCormick, 58, and Barry, 40, met while working together on campus, courting potential Rutgers donors. The pair got engaged after what the president described as a "whirlwind romance." They quickly planned an all-Rutgers wedding.
Rev. M. William Howard, a member of the Rutgers Board of Governors, is scheduled to perform the ceremony. Mason Gross School of the Arts Dean George Stauffer, an accomplished organist, will perform on the chapel's large pipe organ.
The ceremony will be followed by a reception in the Busch Dining Hall in Piscataway catered by Rutgers' chefs. The couple will be paying for the entire wedding.
Cogan offered to waive Kirkpa trick Chapel's $600 fee as a courtesy to the president, but the couple turned him down.
"They insisted on paying full price," he said. "They didn't want any special treatment."
Kelly Heyboer covers higher education. She may be reached at khey boer@starledger.com or (973) 392-5929.
By Patricia Lamiell
Credit: J. Paul Studios
Laura Smolenski (DC ‘03) married Robert Cunius (RC ‘03) June 25 in the same spot at Kirkpatrick where her alumni parents, Susan and Anthony Smolenski, wed 30 years before.
When President Richard L. McCormick and Joan C. Barry, director of principal gifts at the Rutgers Foundation, were married in a 6 p.m. ceremony July 22, they followed a long Rutgers tradition of weddings in historic Kirkpatrick Chapel.
The high-Gothic, Victorian brownstone structure, completed in 1873, has been the picturesque setting for the nuptials of hundreds of Rutgers faculty, staff, students, and graduates and their families. In recent years, even couples with no connection to Rutgers who appreciate the chapel’s nondenominational, dignified ambiance have been married there.
Kirkpatrick weddings – particularly popular among couples who met at Rutgers – began in the late 1940s at the rate of two or three per year, increasing to 114 last year.
The chapel hosts a variety of university and nonuniversity events, including baptisms, memorial services, investitures, lectures, and musical performances. But the biggest business is in weddings, said Patrick J. Cogan, operations coordinator for the chapel. “We’ve really become a wedding facility in the past five or six years,” Cogan said. There is an event every weekend, mostly weddings scheduled at 90-minute intervals from Friday evenings through Sunday evenings.
The building was designed by Henry Janeway Hardenbergh, great-great grandson of Jacob Rutsen Hardenbergh, the first president of Queen’s College. Henry Hardenbergh would go on to design the luxurious Plaza and Waldorf-Astoria hotels, as well as the Dakota apartment building, all in New York City.
Notable Rutgers weddings at Kirkpatrick Chapel included those of Katharine Gross, daughter of President Mason Gross, in 1967; and Barbara Ann Abernethy, daughter of longtime Rutgers Chaplain Bradford S. Abernethy. In 1981, two sets of twins who met at the university – Keith and Mark Sproul and Deborah and Carol Vargo – were married in a double ceremony at the chapel.
On June 25 this year, Laura Smolenski (Douglass College ’03) married Robert Cunius (Rutgers College ’03) in the same spot at Kirkpatrick where her alumni parents, Susan and Anthony Smolenski, were wed in 1975. Laura’s parents selected the chapel because they had met at Rutgers and because they wanted an interfaith service.
“Rutgers is a beautiful campus,” Susan Smolenski said. “We were married in November, so the leaves were really pretty.” Thirty years later, said Laura Cunius, she and Robert “never really thought of getting married anywhere else.”
David Drinkwater, a music faculty member and the organist at Kirkpatrick from 1955 until his retirement in 1998, recalls some tender (and amusing) wedding moments. One bride was walking down the 75-foot aisle when her veil caught on something, snatching her headpiece – and hairpiece – off her head. There was the wedding party that roared up the front circular driveway from Somerset Street on motorcycles, the groom attired in a lamé jumpsuit and the bride in a high-collared dress shaped like a calla lily.
There are the animal stories. Drinkwater recalls playing at a half a dozen or more weddings over the years that included a family dog, sometimes serving as a ring bearer. (This practice is no longer permitted, said Cogan, who sometimes must assert practicality over romanticism as manager of the 133-year-old building. He recently vetoed a couple’s request to release thousands of butterflies into the chapel immediately following recitation of the vows. “Who would clean up all those dead butterflies?”)
Listed within Queen’s College on the national and New Jersey registers of historic places, the chapel is not air-conditioned. This is in part for fear of damaging the 3,300-pipe Aeolian Skinner organ, designed for the chapel and custom built in 1917; or the 22 richly framed oil portraits of Rutgers founders and dignitaries (including one woman, Sophia Astley Kirkpatrick, the chapel’s original benefactor and namesake) that line the chapel’s Rutgers-red walls. On hot summer days, the massive, wood side doors on either side of the altar are thrown open, inviting the occasional four-legged or winged wedding crasher. Once a frisky squirrel leaped from one of the brass chandeliers to the floor and scampered between the guests’ feet down the length of the building.
Music requests have evolved with the times, Drinkwater said. “The Wagner wedding march, the Mendelssohn bridal march – those sounded magnificent on that organ,” in large part due to the lush acoustics produced by reverberations from the 36-foot-high, vaulted wood ceiling. But occasionally, in the 1960s and 1970s, the organist had to reject “wild, rhythmic things that wouldn’t be suitable” for the organ, which is still tuned in turn-of-the-century style.
Cogan forecasts no decline in wedding requests at Kirkpatrick, which charges $600 per ceremony and turned a $20,000 profit last year. The income will help fund a needed $1.5 million restoration of the original stained glass windows (including three by the famed Tiffany Studios). Additional money is needed to install handicapped-accessible bathrooms.
Cogan is delighted that the wedding business helps to raise money for the upkeep of this architectural gem on the Rutgers-New Brunswick Campus. Besides, Cogan, a trained actor whose credits include Father Mark in the off-Broadway show “Tony n’ Tina's Wedding,” Daddy Warbucks in the national tour of “Annie,” and Harold Nichols in the national tour of “The Full Monty,” enjoys playing wedding planner. “Who’s got a better job than I do, helping people get married?”
To view chapel photos or find information about hosting an event, visit www.kirkpatrickchapel.rutgers.edu.
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There was never a time when Kiersten Hickman-Perfetti questioned why fate had delivered such a cruel blow. Despite the litany of surgeries and hospitalizations, she had a smile permanently etched on her face.
Kiersten, an impassioned Rutgers women's basketball fan whose four-year battle with cancer inspired the Scarlet Knights to dedicate the 2007-08 season to her, died peacefully yesterday at her home in Highland Park with her parents, Larry and Mimi, by her side. She was 22.
A public viewing will be held on Sunday from 2 to 4 p.m. and 7 to 9 p.m. at the Jaqui-Kuhn Funeral Home, 17 South Adelaide Ave., Highland Park. A memorial service will also be held at 1 p.m. on May 4 at the Kirkpatrick Chapel on the Rutgers campus in New Brunswick.
"She had this indomitable spirit, this desire to live that carried her through these (difficult) years," Larry Perfetti said. "Despite a million opportunities to complain, she didn't. It's beyond my belief that she could do that. It amazed me."
Kiersten played basketball and softball and threw the discus and shot put at Highland Park High School. She also played the clarinet in the band and served as the football and baseball team manager. She played basketball her freshman year for Division 3 Goucher College in Baltimore, Md.
On Aug. 10, 2004, Kiersten began her battle with rhabdomyosarcoma, a cancer that usually afflicts young children. She continued to fight after doctors gave her six months to live, undergoing two brain surgeries, open-heart surgery, 80 rounds of chemotherapy and 72 days of radiation during the next four years. She spent 181 days in the hospital in 2005.
"She was just an amazing woman, too young to leave the world," Rutgers senior guard Katie Adams said. "She was so courageous to go through this. She meant so much to this team as an inspiration. Personally, she's my hero. I admire her with all my heart."
Kiersten started attending Rutgers games in 1998. Through the years, she developed a bond with the coaches and players. Despite being diagnosed with cancer, she continued to go to games even when she was so sick she could barely walk.
"Kiersten was a special person in our lives," Rutgers coach C. Vivian Stringer said. "She was a fighter and a winner. She'll always be a part of our Rutgers family."
When Kiersten's condition worsened, the Scarlet Knights decided to dedicate the season to their adopted teammate. They made Kiersten an honorary captain for Rutgers' upset victory against Connecticut at the Rutgers Athletic Center in February. She was also given the Scarlet Heart award at the Rutgers banquet last season for the team member that exemplifies the most courage.
"I don't know how she did it," Adams said. "If I had gone through that, I probably would have been sad and upset and mad at the world, but she made jokes and just smiled about everything. Nothing got her down. Not even this cancer. ... She was herself. She never changed. It was a short life, but she lived it to the fullest."
That meant taking art classes, visiting 33 states and spending the final stage of her life with her parents, her only sibling -- younger brother Keith -- and friends.
Through it all, there was a deep connection with the Rutgers women's basketball program.
"They provided her with a great deal of love, a great deal of inspiration, a great deal of mutual admiration and friendships that lasted over the years," Larry Perfetti said. "She always had the Rutgers basketball team. We became a part of their family, and they became a part of our family. They kept her going. It was a beautiful thing."
In lieu of flowers, the family asks that donations be made in Kiersten's memory for cancer research to Kier's Kidz Lemonade Stand, c/o Alex's Lemonade Stand Foundation, 333 East Lancaster Ave., Suite 414, Wynnewood, Pa., 19096. For further information, phone (866) 333-1213.
