Standing in ruin on Monday near Madison Square Park was not only a hub of Serbian life in New York City.

Standing in ruin was a landmark of old New York.

Standing in ruin, too, was a symbol of restless Manhattan; a spiritual home for wealthy Episcopalians, the lost souls of the notorious Tenderloin and generations of Orthodox Christians, who knew it as the Cathedral of St. Sava. Peter II, the last king of Yugoslavia, attended services there.

In this brownstone house of worship at 15 West 25th Street — now scorched and roofless after a fire on Sunday — Edith Newbold Jones was married in April 1885 to Edward Robbins Wharton.

At the time, the building was a “chapel of ease,” built and run by the parish of Trinity Church on Wall Street to serve the gentry Mrs. Wharton would later write about: well-to-do society families who had deserted Lower Manhattan for the pleasant upper reaches of the city, in the East and West 20s.