St. James House of Prayer Episcopal Church, also known as the Episcopal House of Prayer, is an active Episcopal parish and historic church building in Tampa, Florida, United States. It is located at 2708 Central Avenue in the city's Tampa Heights neighborhood. On February 21, 1991, the building was added to the U.S. National Register of Historic Places. The structure is also included as an official contributing property within the Tampa Heights Historic District, which was declared a Historic District nationally by the United States Department of the Interior on August 4, 1995, and locally by the city of Tampa on September 7, 2000. Additionally, the building is one of only two churches to have been designated a Local Landmark Structure by the city of Tampa. Parish history St. James House of Prayer is an active parish under the Tampa Deanery of the Episcopal Diocese of Southwest Florida, which is within Province 4 of the Episcopal Church in the United States of America, part of the worldwide Anglican Communion. The congregation officially formed in 1997 through the merger of two long established congregations, St. James Episcopal Church and The House of Prayer Episcopal Church. The merger of the two was made after the former St. James Church property was chosen as the site for the new Blake High School. Meanwhile, The House of Prayer had lost their rector and parish status after a decline in membership. Joining the two congregations was mutually beneficial, matching the parishioners in need of a priest with the priest in need of a pulpit. The union resulted in full parish status being conferred upon the new St. James House of Prayer in 2001. The original St. James Episcopal was organized in 1892 as an Anglican Episcopal Church for the city's black population. At that time, segregation was the norm, and many black Bahamian and Cuban immigrants were arriving in Tampa to work in the cigar industry. St. James Episcopal Church would go on to serve Tampa's African-American community for more than a century. Nearly as old was Tampa's third white Episcopal church, the House of Prayer, founded in 1907. The church served the population of Tampa Heights, and by 1926 was named a parish by the local diocese. The House of Prayer went on to become one of Tampa's first racially integrated churches in the 1960s, but within the next decade much of its membership