12/22/2025
For nearly a century, Colgate Rochester Crozer Divinity School sat like a sentinel above the city, perched on the hill at 1100 South Goodman St., its Gothic towers peering over Highland Park. Designed by James Gamble Rogers, the same architect who left his mark on Yale and Columbia, the campus radiated a stately stillness that seemed immune to time.
CRCDS traces its lineage to Rochester Theological Seminary, founded downtown in 1850; Hamilton Seminary, which merged with it in 1928; and Crozer Theological Seminary of Pennsylvania, whose most famous student, Martin Luther King Jr., refined his theology of nonviolence there in the late 1940s.
Now, in a move as symbolic as it is strategic, Colgate Rochester Crozer Divinity School (CRCDS) has returned downtown, moving into the historic Sibley Triangle Building a few steps from Parcel 5, Eastman School of Music and the heartbeat of Rochester’s rebirth.
Read George Cassidy Payne’s full story in our December issue, on stands and online now, link in comments. 🔗
