News
New
Missions for Old Churches
Majestic buildings that once anchored
their neighborhoods face uncertain fates as the Albany Catholic Diocese
closes them down
By MARK PARRY, Staff Writer
First published: Sunday, December 10, 2006
ALBANY -- T he refrain of this Sunday's sermon is "burn, baby, burn." And the Rev. Henry Jackson is about to blow.
It builds from a hushed rasp as the black-robed pastor hunches over his Bible in this former Catholic church. Exodus. Chapter 3. The burning bush.
It smolders as his words, louder now, crash over a drummer's beat. We got a problem in Arbor Hill, the Pentecostal preacher says. We got a problem in Pine Hills. We got a problem in Loudonville.And then it blows as Jackson points down the red-carpeted aisle, climbs atop a banister and thunders about the troubled streets outside.
"We can take back the city which God has given us," Jackson says. "There's not supposed to be drugs on our streets. There's supposed to be healing on our streets!"
It's a safe bet the Polish immigrants who opened St. Casimir's Catholic Church in 1893 never imagined this scene. But as shifting demographics and a shortage of priests force the Roman Catholic Diocese of Albany to close parishes, the sale and rebirth of this inner-city church offers one answer to a pressing question: What will happen to the old churches?
Often, Protestant congregations like Jackson's take over closed Catholic churches. But other times, the buildings have decayed from architectural gems into vacant shells, their stained-glass windows smashed by vagrants, their fixtures plundered, their new owners striving to reuse these ghosts of ethnic enclaves that no longer exist.
Look at the parish where Bishop Howard Hubbard was assigned as a young priest, the former St. John's Church by I-787 in Albany's Pastures neighborhood.Plans to turn the building into luxury apartments have stalled. Its railings, pillars and steps were auctioned off. Its exterior is tattooed with plywood boards and overgrown vines. Its owner compares the off-limits interior to the rotting Wellington Hotel.
"This thing was just becoming a money pit," said co-owner Anthony DeThomasis, walking around the structure he bought for just $10,000. "I don't mind spending money on it if I know I'm going somewhere. But we need to see light at the end of the tunnel." More unneeded churches may soon hit the market. The diocese already has closed about 30 churches over the past 25 years. A two-year planning program announced in June will close some parishes and combine others.
The diocese announced last week that Holy Cross Roman Catholic Church in Schenectady will close Dec. 31.
Diocesan officials refuse to speculate on how many. But one lay leader steeped in the closure process figures the 14-county diocese, which has more than 165 parishes and 400,000 Catholics, could shut down an additional 30. The Archdiocese of Boston, he points out, began a sweeping realignment in 2004 that has shrunk its total parishes from 357 to 296.
"I'm assuming they're going to close 25 percent of the churches in the next couple of years," said John Razzano, a finance committee member at Watervliet's Immaculate Heart of Mary Parish. "The general view is that there is a demand for small to moderate-sized churches, but at low prices because small denominations looking for a permanent home don't have much money."
Ancillary buildings like schools may be easier to unload than the churches, Razzano said.
In Albany, for example, the Equinox community-services agency is opening a shelter in the old friary next to Our Lady of Angels Church on Central Avenue at Robin Street. The German church, closed last year after suburban flight sapped its pews, remains "ready for sale."
And then you have the deserted churches, like St. Joseph's in Albany's Arbor Hill. "Oh look - an egg," says Susan Holland on a recent morning, pointing to a shell not far from the altar. "We have pigeons." Pigeons are just the beginning. Holland's Historic Albany Foundation, the latest owner of a building the diocese first discarded in 1981, also has to contend with thieves who pillaged the fence. And winds that swept slabs of its slate roof to the sidewalk.And a vagrant who thinks he lives in the church.
The man heaved a huge rock through a window around Labor Day. He came back the next night and rammed the window with a board. Now there's a hole the shape of Michigan.The window would cost $40,000 to replace, easy. Albany County sent a $200 restitution check.
It's significant that Holland, bundled in a baby-blue knit hat and furry collar, can even stand under the angel-carved ceiling. Historic Albany took over St. Joseph's in 2003 after the city seized it by eminent domain from Lark Street restaurateur Elda Abate. The city spent $300,000 to prevent it from falling down.
The 1856 neo-Gothic colossus in the historic Ten Broeck Triangle inspired more than $210,000 in donations for its preservation. But the church has yet to inspire a serious proposal for its reuse.The Albany Public Library flirted with setting up shop there, Holland says, but balked at the $30 million renovation cost.
Is the St. Joseph's situation unusual? Not in the diocese's home city of Albany A few minutes after Holland wraps up her tour of St. Joseph's, developer Anthony DeThomasis stands at the scene of his own struggle to convert another Catholic church.That church, at Green and Westerlo streets, was called St. John's. It closed in 1978.
Rising interest rates had basically mothballed a plan to reuse it as housing. But "now that rates are dropping we are seriously looking at getting this thing going again," DeThomasis says. The idea is to create four floors and fill them with up to 28 luxury apartments, elevator and all. It stalled as the developers wrangled over details with the city Historic Resources Commission.
It also met with skepticism. DeThomasis remembers the questions. Can you really get people to move down there? Do you really want to invest almost $2 million so "close to the projects"? Any interest in putting a strip club there? "People perceive the area to be bad," he said. "Believe it or not, it's a pretty stable neighborhood."
Yet another barren church sits just up Madison Avenue from Lombardo's Restaurant. St. Anthony's closed as a result of construction of the Empire State Plaza in the 1960s. The project forced many to leave what was a working-class Italian area. The nonprofit Grand Street Community Arts paid $5,000 for the red-and-yellow brick building in 2004. It's about to begin a fundraising campaign for renovations that, if done completely, would cost $1 million. The goal is to open a community center with a focus on arts.
"There were a number of groups that tried to save the building," said Larry Becker, an Albany lawyer on the nonprofit's board. "But they didn't take. We intend to take. We're definitely going to save this building." Compared with the pittances paid for these old churches, Jackson's church spent $200,000 to buy St. Casimir's on Sheridan Avenue.
The Pentecostal pastor and his wife have plans to match the investment. Their Greater Immanuel Faith Temple will offer a refuge for what Jackson called a "depleted" neighborhood. They want to start an after-school program. Feed the hungry. Reach out to prison inmates. "We're trying to catch those that drop through the loopholes," Jackson says from a rear pew.
Away from the pulpit, his voice is soft. But its cadence is the same. A rhetorical question - Don't you know? - often punctuates his sentences. In part to send a message, the Jacksons moved from a Pine Hills home with marble floors to the church parsonage. Both maintain day jobs with the state.
If their modest house of worship near Henry Johnson Boulevard hardly rises above the two-story homes that flank it, the building is a palace compared with the Jacksons' old storefront church on Central Avenue.
And if only 20 worshipers sprinkle the pews on a recent morning, trends in Christianity bode well for their future.
Pentecostalism and similar charismatic movements make up "one of the fastest-growing segments of global Christianity," according to a study by the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life. At least 25 percent of the planet's 2 billion Christians are believed to practice these "lively" faiths.
So lively that as Co-Pastor Barbara Jackson takes the microphone, the 20 worshipers in front of her generate more stained-glass-window-thumping noise than the church has probably felt in years.
"What's his name?" Jackson asks, holding her mic out. "Jesus!" comes the reply. "He's so wonderful! He's so awesome! He's so glorious!" Two women in the front pews beat tambourines. An older man in a gray suit sways. Even a teenager stands up, half-clapping to match her I'm-too-cool-for-this expression. "2007 is my year," Jackson says. `It's my year!" Don't you know?
Marc Parry can be reached at 454-5057 or by e-mail at mparry@timesunion.com.
By MARK PARRY, Staff Writer
First published: Sunday, December 10, 2006
ALBANY -- T he refrain of this Sunday's sermon is "burn, baby, burn." And the Rev. Henry Jackson is about to blow.
It builds from a hushed rasp as the black-robed pastor hunches over his Bible in this former Catholic church. Exodus. Chapter 3. The burning bush.
It smolders as his words, louder now, crash over a drummer's beat. We got a problem in Arbor Hill, the Pentecostal preacher says. We got a problem in Pine Hills. We got a problem in Loudonville.And then it blows as Jackson points down the red-carpeted aisle, climbs atop a banister and thunders about the troubled streets outside.
"We can take back the city which God has given us," Jackson says. "There's not supposed to be drugs on our streets. There's supposed to be healing on our streets!"
It's a safe bet the Polish immigrants who opened St. Casimir's Catholic Church in 1893 never imagined this scene. But as shifting demographics and a shortage of priests force the Roman Catholic Diocese of Albany to close parishes, the sale and rebirth of this inner-city church offers one answer to a pressing question: What will happen to the old churches?
Often, Protestant congregations like Jackson's take over closed Catholic churches. But other times, the buildings have decayed from architectural gems into vacant shells, their stained-glass windows smashed by vagrants, their fixtures plundered, their new owners striving to reuse these ghosts of ethnic enclaves that no longer exist.
Look at the parish where Bishop Howard Hubbard was assigned as a young priest, the former St. John's Church by I-787 in Albany's Pastures neighborhood.Plans to turn the building into luxury apartments have stalled. Its railings, pillars and steps were auctioned off. Its exterior is tattooed with plywood boards and overgrown vines. Its owner compares the off-limits interior to the rotting Wellington Hotel.
"This thing was just becoming a money pit," said co-owner Anthony DeThomasis, walking around the structure he bought for just $10,000. "I don't mind spending money on it if I know I'm going somewhere. But we need to see light at the end of the tunnel." More unneeded churches may soon hit the market. The diocese already has closed about 30 churches over the past 25 years. A two-year planning program announced in June will close some parishes and combine others.
The diocese announced last week that Holy Cross Roman Catholic Church in Schenectady will close Dec. 31.
Diocesan officials refuse to speculate on how many. But one lay leader steeped in the closure process figures the 14-county diocese, which has more than 165 parishes and 400,000 Catholics, could shut down an additional 30. The Archdiocese of Boston, he points out, began a sweeping realignment in 2004 that has shrunk its total parishes from 357 to 296.
"I'm assuming they're going to close 25 percent of the churches in the next couple of years," said John Razzano, a finance committee member at Watervliet's Immaculate Heart of Mary Parish. "The general view is that there is a demand for small to moderate-sized churches, but at low prices because small denominations looking for a permanent home don't have much money."
Ancillary buildings like schools may be easier to unload than the churches, Razzano said.
In Albany, for example, the Equinox community-services agency is opening a shelter in the old friary next to Our Lady of Angels Church on Central Avenue at Robin Street. The German church, closed last year after suburban flight sapped its pews, remains "ready for sale."
And then you have the deserted churches, like St. Joseph's in Albany's Arbor Hill. "Oh look - an egg," says Susan Holland on a recent morning, pointing to a shell not far from the altar. "We have pigeons." Pigeons are just the beginning. Holland's Historic Albany Foundation, the latest owner of a building the diocese first discarded in 1981, also has to contend with thieves who pillaged the fence. And winds that swept slabs of its slate roof to the sidewalk.And a vagrant who thinks he lives in the church.
The man heaved a huge rock through a window around Labor Day. He came back the next night and rammed the window with a board. Now there's a hole the shape of Michigan.The window would cost $40,000 to replace, easy. Albany County sent a $200 restitution check.
It's significant that Holland, bundled in a baby-blue knit hat and furry collar, can even stand under the angel-carved ceiling. Historic Albany took over St. Joseph's in 2003 after the city seized it by eminent domain from Lark Street restaurateur Elda Abate. The city spent $300,000 to prevent it from falling down.
The 1856 neo-Gothic colossus in the historic Ten Broeck Triangle inspired more than $210,000 in donations for its preservation. But the church has yet to inspire a serious proposal for its reuse.The Albany Public Library flirted with setting up shop there, Holland says, but balked at the $30 million renovation cost.
Is the St. Joseph's situation unusual? Not in the diocese's home city of Albany A few minutes after Holland wraps up her tour of St. Joseph's, developer Anthony DeThomasis stands at the scene of his own struggle to convert another Catholic church.That church, at Green and Westerlo streets, was called St. John's. It closed in 1978.
Rising interest rates had basically mothballed a plan to reuse it as housing. But "now that rates are dropping we are seriously looking at getting this thing going again," DeThomasis says. The idea is to create four floors and fill them with up to 28 luxury apartments, elevator and all. It stalled as the developers wrangled over details with the city Historic Resources Commission.
It also met with skepticism. DeThomasis remembers the questions. Can you really get people to move down there? Do you really want to invest almost $2 million so "close to the projects"? Any interest in putting a strip club there? "People perceive the area to be bad," he said. "Believe it or not, it's a pretty stable neighborhood."
Yet another barren church sits just up Madison Avenue from Lombardo's Restaurant. St. Anthony's closed as a result of construction of the Empire State Plaza in the 1960s. The project forced many to leave what was a working-class Italian area. The nonprofit Grand Street Community Arts paid $5,000 for the red-and-yellow brick building in 2004. It's about to begin a fundraising campaign for renovations that, if done completely, would cost $1 million. The goal is to open a community center with a focus on arts.
"There were a number of groups that tried to save the building," said Larry Becker, an Albany lawyer on the nonprofit's board. "But they didn't take. We intend to take. We're definitely going to save this building." Compared with the pittances paid for these old churches, Jackson's church spent $200,000 to buy St. Casimir's on Sheridan Avenue.
The Pentecostal pastor and his wife have plans to match the investment. Their Greater Immanuel Faith Temple will offer a refuge for what Jackson called a "depleted" neighborhood. They want to start an after-school program. Feed the hungry. Reach out to prison inmates. "We're trying to catch those that drop through the loopholes," Jackson says from a rear pew.
Away from the pulpit, his voice is soft. But its cadence is the same. A rhetorical question - Don't you know? - often punctuates his sentences. In part to send a message, the Jacksons moved from a Pine Hills home with marble floors to the church parsonage. Both maintain day jobs with the state.
If their modest house of worship near Henry Johnson Boulevard hardly rises above the two-story homes that flank it, the building is a palace compared with the Jacksons' old storefront church on Central Avenue.
And if only 20 worshipers sprinkle the pews on a recent morning, trends in Christianity bode well for their future.
Pentecostalism and similar charismatic movements make up "one of the fastest-growing segments of global Christianity," according to a study by the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life. At least 25 percent of the planet's 2 billion Christians are believed to practice these "lively" faiths.
So lively that as Co-Pastor Barbara Jackson takes the microphone, the 20 worshipers in front of her generate more stained-glass-window-thumping noise than the church has probably felt in years.
"What's his name?" Jackson asks, holding her mic out. "Jesus!" comes the reply. "He's so wonderful! He's so awesome! He's so glorious!" Two women in the front pews beat tambourines. An older man in a gray suit sways. Even a teenager stands up, half-clapping to match her I'm-too-cool-for-this expression. "2007 is my year," Jackson says. `It's my year!" Don't you know?
Marc Parry can be reached at 454-5057 or by e-mail at mparry@timesunion.com.
and
Architectural Parts Warehouse
89 Lexington Avenue
Albany, NY 12206
518/465-0876
www.historic-albany.org