Magnificat’s February 6th Concert at St. Luke’s in San Francisco
Magnificat’s concert on Sunday February 6 will take place at St. Luke’s Episcopal Church on Clay and Van Ness in San Francisco rather than our usual venue of St. Mark’s Lutheran. While this will be the first Magnificat series concert at St. Luke’s, our affiliate the Jubilate Orchestra has performed several times with the choir and former St. Luke’s music director David Farr was one of Magnificat’s original board members in 1989.
The parish of St. Luke’s was founded in 1868 and was first located in a building at 1625 Pacific Avenue. In 1884, the original wooden church was placed on rollers and moved to the parish’s current location at the corner of Van Ness and Clay. During the next decade, the church was expanded twice, and its membership grew to be the largest Episcopal congregation on the Pacific coast and a new church was built. This magnificent church, designed by Albert Sutton, was constructed of brick covered in rough, blue-grey sandstone. It was consecrated in 1900 and seated close to a thousand people.
Unfortunately, this church was utterly destroyed in the 1906 earthquake and fire. The vestry retained Benjamin Geer McDougall as architect for the beautiful French Gothic sanctuary built in 1910. The worship experience is enhanced by the building’s many stained-glass windows, especially the east window over the altar and those which flank the nave on its north and south sides. The altar window, which depicts the Resurrection, was installed in 1911. The stained-glass windows on the north and south walls of the nave depict the Virgin Mary, various Saints and Biblical scenes. Read more at the St. Luke’s Episcopal Church website.