St. Joseph's Episcopal Church

This English Gothic church was the successor to the earlier St. Joseph's Memorial Chapel, located at Woodward Avenue and Medbury Streets. The architect, James J. Nettleton, a graduate of Cornell University's school of architecture and former draftsman with the Detroit firm of Donaldson and Meier, was a member of St. Joseph's congregation. In 1971, St. Matthew's, Detroit's oldest Black Episcopal congregation, merged with St. Joseph's Episcopal after the sale of their building to another congregation. The 1926-27 St. Joseph's Church is a well-preserved locally significant example of the Neo-Gothic movement in church architecture.

The structure, measuring 125 feet in length and 96 feet in width, is located on the northeast corner of Woodward Avenue and Holbrook in Detroit. The church is a dark coursed sandstone, English Gothic-style church with gray limestone trim built in 1926-27. It is typically Gothic in plan with a tall, narrow, gabled nave with lower side aisles extending back to projecting, gabled transepts. The north transept is abutted by a tall, square, flat-roofed tower with a louvered belfry, which serves as the transitional element between the church and the 1½-story, Gothic, parish house wing which stretches along the rear of the lot to Holbrook Street, making the complex L-shaped. The buttressed facade consists of the usual recessed entrance portal surmounted by a rose window. The buttressed side elevations contain four bays of Gothic clerestory windows extending back to the gabled transepts with their attenuated tripartite Gothic windows. The church interior is early English Gothic in feeling with a wooden, beamed ceiling and massive masonry piers. It is dimly lit by richly colored, stained-glass windows. The sanctuary is furnished with elaborately carved oak panelling and furniture in the Gothic style.