On Campus
Taking vows at Rutgers’ Kirkpatrick Chapel
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.