Seeking Salvation for Church Buildings

At first glance, the empty 1906 church building seemed like a prescription for disaster. The roof leaked, gables were sagging and plaster arches were badly cracked.

How could this old Gothic-style pile of sandstone be converted into a modern office with Internet links and efficient lighting? How could a modern business function in a supposedly haunted church that had an organ loft, Sunday school classrooms and a belfry?

“We looked at it and shook our heads and thought, ‘Are we really crazy? Do we really want to do this?’ ‘ recalled architect Steve Arai, one of the current owners. Yet, luring them were the glorious stained-glass windows, the promise of large and open work spaces and the possibilities of tax credits for fixing a historic property.

In deciding to buy the former Capitol Hill United Methodist Church in Seattle four years ago, Arai and his partners joined a national trend that preservationists hope will be followed at St. Vibiana’s Roman Catholic Cathedral in downtown Los Angeles.

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After the $400,000 purchase, the Arai/Jackson architecture and planning firm spent another $400,000 to renovate the old Seattle church into a stunningly beautiful, and unusual, office for 34 employees. The Seattle area also has a bed-and-breakfast and a restaurant complex in former churches. And around the country, religious buildings have been adapted into secular offices, schools, housing, libraries, social service agencies, day-care centers, museums and arts centers.

The Los Angeles Conservancy last month announced a three-month, $25,000 study to find such a new use and buyer for the 120-year-old cathedral. The Roman Catholic archdiocese wants to demolish it or sell it for about $5 million to help fund a new cathedral less than a half-mile away. USC’s School of Architecture is heading the St. Vibiana’s study, joined by distinguished names in Southern California architecture and planning.

St. Vibiana’s presents formidable problems: its asking price, extensive earthquake damage that could require $5 million or several times more to repair, a tough location on the edge of skid row and lingering legal complications over its landmark status. Plus, some critics don’t think any effort is worthwhile because they consider the cathedral so drab. Even some St. Vibiana’s fans wonder whether the archdiocese has ruined the Spanish baroque cathedral at 2nd and Main streets by stripping it of distinctive elements such as the stained-glass windows.

Still, owners of other former churches nationwide suggest the possibilities should at least be studied.

In Seattle, Arai’s personal office is in the balcony room where proceeds of the Sunday collection were counted. Many designers work beneath an octagonal dome of stained glass in the main sanctuary, and the organ loft is another partner’s spacious domain.

“The quality and size and shape and character of a church’s sanctuary spaces are absolutely unique,” Arai said. “To be able to have a function that utilizes that well is what I think is necessary.”

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Preservationists concede that it will not be easy to land a new owner who can survive financially in such a big space as St. Vibiana’s, whose brick, plaster and limestone exterior is 82 feet wide and 202 feet long. And beyond engineering and economics, secular reuses of a religious structure can trigger emotional opposition from people who were baptized, married or bar mitzvahed there. (Such issues also are raised at the empty and decaying Breed Street shul in Boyle Heights.)

The ideal is to find another denomination for an empty church or synagogue, explained Andrea Strassner, an official at Partners for Sacred Places, a Philadelphia-based organization that seeks to preserve religious buildings. If that is not possible, she said, “The trickiest part is finding a use that’s sensitive to the buildings and not mucking up the exterior and yet making something viable. You don’t want to put in another community arts group that is going to go under. The church may end up in even worse disrepair.”

Tax credits help in certain cases. So do deep pockets.

Take the case of Scott Oki, the former Microsoft executive who retired early with a fortune estimated at $100 million. Oki and his wife, Laurie, bought a former Roman Catholic church near their home in the Seattle suburb of Bellevue for about $1 million.

After $800,000 in renovations at the 70-year-old brick building, the Okis converted the main sanctuary into an office for their charitable foundation. That open room with dark-beamed ceilings resembles a country-style home with a kitchen to the rear and a large dining room table on the raised altar area. Offices for their Seattle Sounders soccer team are in the organ loft and in the basement along with the Oki golf course development company.

In other cases, the large open church spaces are sliced up into several floors or loft-style apartments.

For example, developer Andrew Meieran saved the twin-towered, 97-year-old Holy Cross Church in San Francisco from likely demolition by buying it from the Roman Catholic archdiocese last year for $1.1 million. He plans to create 14 units of artist-style lofts inside and additional apartments on adjacent land. In Chicago, another Roman Catholic church is being divided into 18 condominiums.

Banks and building inspectors can be skeptical. “It’s a long hard battle, but if you have the vision it’s well worth every minute of it,” Meieran said.

While congregations move and close because of changing demographics and money woes, nostalgia can complicate preservation efforts, experts say.

“It’s not just the architecture and the decorations. It’s that the buildings have been part of seminal moments in people’s lives,” said Holly Fiala, executive director of Inspired Partnerships, an organization that tries to keep churches alive in the Chicago area. Some buildings are decayed beyond repair, she added.

In New York City, the Limelight disco in a former Episcopal church was recently closed by authorities after a drug sales investigation. Los Angeles Cardinal Roger M. Mahony has said he would sell St. Vibiana’s to a respectable owner such as a museum but not, a spokesman added, to a buyer who intended it for “some terribly profane purposes, such as a saloon.”

On rustic Vashon Island, a ferry boat’s ride away from Seattle, Marnie Jones has converted a wooden 1917 Norwegian Lutheran church into a charming bed-and-breakfast she calls Angels of the Sea. She and her son live in the 24-foot-by-45-foot sanctuary and an enclosed loft overhead. The two guests rooms are in the former Sunday school space below.

The changes can create startling contrasts.

For example, the choir loft of what was St. Joseph’s Roman Catholic Church in Newark, N.J., is now a glass-enclosed computer room for the New Community Corp. That urban renewal organization uses parts of the former 1880 sanctuary for a restaurant and a jazz recital hall, according to its executive director, Father William Linder. Offices are in balcony spaces. “It’s interesting to see the computers next to the original stained glass,” he said.

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Near the University of Washington in Seattle, developers turned a 1906 Methodist Episcopal Church into a restaurant and retail complex called Brooklyn Square. Thai, Korean and Vietnamese eateries now fill street-level Sunday school and social hall spaces. The main sanctuary upstairs was not divided but proved difficult to rent over the past 12 years. A nightclub failed, as did a microbrewery that had fermentation tanks in the belfry and beer storage vats in former classrooms.

“Any time you take a building that was built decades ago or a century ago and try to adapt the use into something current, you are faced with difficult problems,” explained one of the original developers, Bruce Blum. “I would stay away from it now. I would rather build made to order.”

Five years ago, a member of the Vineyard Christian Fellowship of Seattle bought the wood-shingled mission-style complex and gave his church a low-cost lease for the sanctuary, upstairs offices and a coffeehouse space. Brewery pipes remain in the bell tower. The tangy odors of Asian cooking filter throughout the building, a sign of shared tenancy.

“From a spiritual standpoint, I still think it was not just blind chance that the sanctuary was preserved,” Pastor Ed Cook said.

The debate over St. Vibiana’s involves costs and aesthetics.

In a report prepared for the archdiocese earlier this year, UCLA architecture professor emeritus Tim Vreeland concluded that a 1922 remodeling “seriously impaired” the original design by pioneer architect Ezra Kysor. Vreeland used words like “insipid” to describe those ‘20s changes, including an extended facade.

Given the high cost of seismic repairs and previous plans to build a new cathedral on the same site, Vreeland had recommended that only parts of St. Vibiana’s, such as windows and the bell tower, be saved. That enraged the Los Angeles Conservancy. Last week, Vreeland said he will be interested in the upcoming study’s results but still thought it might be too expensive to save the whole church.

In its original 1963 nomination as a city historic-cultural monument, St. Vibiana’s was described as being “for a number of years one of the finest structures built in Southern California since statehood.”

Architectural historian Thomas S. Hines, also a UCLA professor, stressed the importance of maintaining a 19th century structure in contemporary Los Angeles even if St. Vibiana’s has a secular tenant. “This is not a baroque building in Rome,” he said. “This is an American building, a Victorian building. And on the California frontier in 1876, it was a remarkable building, and still is.”