Against the backdrop of America’s past and a thirst for new development, a task force is navigating how to save buildings, engage neighbors and rethink a profession striving to be more inclusive.
Even without the bright orange demolition notice pasted onto its double doors, Christian Street Baptist Church wouldn’t be the most striking building in South Philadelphia.
There’s more high drama in the arched doors and windows of St. Paul’s Catholic Church, one block east. There’s deeper history behind the stone walls of St. Mary Magdalen de Pazzi, the first Italian national parish in the United States and the starting point for the procession of the saints during the Italian Market Festival every May. For a total vision of sacred architecture, Christian Street Baptist doesn’t compete with the National Shrine of St. Rita of Cascia, half a mile to the southwest.
Still, the church, originally built as a Protestant Episcopal mission for Italian immigrants, has been a landmark in the Bella Vista neighborhood since the 1890s. African-American Baptist congregations mainly have been the occupants since the early part of the 20th century. An open belfry tops the eastern tower of its asymmetrical facade. The doorway is capped by a stained-glass transom, surrounded by ornamental terracotta. The brickwork is more intricate on the church than on the similarly scaled rowhouses that surround it on both sides. There’s nothing else exactly like it in the entire city, and if it’s torn down, there will never be anything like it again.
“You could just look at it from an architectural perspective and say that it is a unique building — the scale of it, the style of it,” says Oscar Beisert, a professional architectural historian who’s active in local preservation advocacy. He frequently engages the Philadelphia Historical Commission, which ultimately decides which buildings get placed on the city’s Register of Historic Places, by filing nominations. “You could make a case for the architecture. But I think what’s particularly special about this building is that it relates to the history of immigrant populations in Philadelphia. The Protestant Episcopal Church was the most fashionable religion in 19th-century America, and so because of that, they had a lot of money, and they started a lot of these mission congregations to not only try to convert people, but to provide social services that the government didn’t provide at the time.”
Today, Bella Vista, south of Center City, is among the most competitive real estate markets in Philadelphia. Newcomers are mostly white; longstanding black communities have dwindled. The current congregation at Christian Street Baptist Church has contracted as well — it’s now only about a dozen strong — and has struggled to maintain the property. This year, the congregation decided to sell the church, which has structural issues and a mold problem; they were also eyeing the prospect of securing cash to move to another facility.
In a matter of hours, a Philadelphia developer who planned to tear down the church and build townhomes offered just below the asking price of around $1.5 million, and the congregation accepted. Then Beisert stepped in. He nominated the church for historic protection at the city level.
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Christian Street Baptist Church may be unique, but its dilemma is not. In a similar case in 2015, Beisert and other preservationists stepped in to designate First African Baptist Church, the oldest of its kind in Pennsylvania, six blocks west of Christian Street Baptist, after the pastor sought to sell it to a developer who proposed demolition. In that case, the demolition was opposed by a group of congregants as well, and while the church was eventually sold, it was also listed on the historic register, and is being repurposed as a daycare center and condominiums. A Pew report released in October concluded that many of Philadelphia’s historic religious properties are facing maintenance problems, and that more and more congregations will face tough choices about what to do with their properties as time goes by.
“It really comes down to a question,” says Paul Steinke, executive director of the Preservation Alliance of Greater Philadelphia, which supported the nomination of Christian Street Baptist Church. “Does a congregation, like any other property owner, have the right to extract full value from their property? Or does the community have the right to retain these ornaments to the cityscape in some way? Is it a desired goal of city government to facilitate the transitioning of religious properties away from sacred use? We would argue that it is. Churches are one of the most important parts of the built environment in terms of imparting character and a sense of permanence to a neighborhood, and religious properties in particular should receive special consideration in terms of incentives and regulations to encourage their preservation and adaptive reuse.”
It’s not just churches that are under threat. The rejuvenation of Philadelphia’s real estate market has been accompanied by the destruction of iconic theaters, beloved diners, public schools, landmark hospitals and hundreds of run-of-the-mill rowhomes that, taken together, make up the essential urban fabric of the city.
“Our preservation laws were designed originally to encompass the broad range of history and the broad range of cultural heritage that every American values,” says Will Cook, associate general counsel at the National Trust for Historic Preservation. “When these laws were being applied in the very beginning, there tended to be an emphasis to focus on significant architectural heritage of national leaders of the colonial period. So because of that emphasis, I think it’s fair to say that there’s a lot of untold history that has not become known, based on the National Register of Historic Places, and that’s been changing over time.”
Read the entire article at Next City.