ST. LOUIS -- St. Louis is a town of believers: in traditions, in community and, perhaps most especially, in second chances.
That grace is extended to its buildings as well as its people.
“St. Louis likes to save old things, not tear old things down,” says Chris Hansen, executive director of the Kranzberg Arts Foundation.
The nonprofit runs the Grandel, built in 1884 as a First Congregational Church, which now includes a 600-seat theater and the Dark Room, a bar, music venue and gallery.
The Grand Center structure is one of dozens of left-for-dead houses of worship across the region that have been resurrected as entertainment venues, fitness centers, high-end lodging and even a skate park. For many, the reinventions echo their original callings as spirit-lifters, celebration-holders, and champions of history and the arts.
In Webster Groves, a century-old church that had cycled through at least five congregations was reborn in 2018 as the Tuxedo Park STL Bed & Breakfast Inn, following a rescue effort by owners Bill and Maureen Elliott.
In Granite City, the nucleus of a downtown makeover is a genre-expansive establishment — the old Niedringhaus United Methodist Church — that’s slated to open early this year as the Mill.
Last summer, the burned-out National Memorial Church of God in Christ finished its transformation from an impromptu, though precarious, rendezvous for picnicking, pop-up weddings and photo backdrops with the help of a Grandel Square neighbor, the Pulitzer Arts Foundation.
“We saw potential,” says Kristin Fleischmann Brewer, the deputy director of public engagement.
The foundation spent about two years shoring up the structure but didn’t replace the roof, which had been consumed by a fire in 2001.
The new Spring Church is open to the sky — and open to the community, every day from sunrise to sunset.
Abby Frohne, the director of marketing at the Center of Creative Arts, doesn’t like to credit divine intervention for COCA landing its striking University City location, but she doesn’t discount it, either.
“It was a fortuitous situation,” she says.
In the mid-1980s, as the idea for the nonprofit was taking shape, the B’Nai Amoona Jewish congregation was preparing to leave Trinity Avenue for a new home in Creve Coeur.
The congregation moved out, and COCA moved in. Developer Richard Baron remodeled the midcentury modern synagogue, designed by Erich Mendelsohn in the 1940s, converting the altar into a theater and offices into classrooms and workshops.
One element was left untouched: the windows. The sweeping walls of glass allowed light in on the Sabbath, when traditional Jewish practice prohibited the use of electricity.
“It comes in from above,” Frohne says. “There are windows in places and spaces you wouldn’t think.”
Now, they illuminate students learning to dance, paint, act and sing.
Work on the building can seem never-ending. Roof repairs are up next. But rehab headaches are worth it, Frohne says.
“It was created as a hub of the community and a place for gathering,” she says. “It still is.”
When Stray Dog Theatre was founded in 2003, “we were truly stray dogs,” says artistic director Gary Bell. Plays were staged around town, with the goal that, eventually, the offbeat performance company would find a forever home.
Then, the congregation at the United Church of Christ, next door to Bell’s house in Tower Grove East, started dwindling. Stray Dog began putting on shows there, and in 2007, the pack of actors took over the church entirely.
Physical changes were minimal. Bell was skeptical when the architect suggested the pews stay but figured he could change his mind later.
He didn’t.
“Sitting together is very community-oriented,” Bell says. “And our mission is very community-oriented.”
On a smaller scale, Jeff Scally of south St. Louis was thinking about his Lindenwood Park neighbors when he purchased an old church that came on the market in fall 2020. Immanuel Congregational had closed a decade prior.
Scally envisioned the dilapidated Jamieson Avenue property as a members-only club for nearby folks who share his interests: tabletop games and golf, beer tastings and book discussions.
“It’s a 9,000-square-foot mancave, essentially,” he says. “There’s a space for a bunch of my hobbies.”
Renovations, hampered by pandemic and supply-chain hiccups, have been a slog. But Scally expects Lindenwood Park Place to open this year. He aims to stay small, no more than 75 members, who will pay about $12 a month to join.
“It’s all kind of just a blank canvas,” he says.
In the late 1980s, the United Hebrew Congregation, the first Jewish congregation west of the Mississippi River, was eyeing a larger space in Chesterfield. The Byzantine-style house of worship on Skinker Boulevard needed a buyer.
But who would be in the market for an ornate temple topped with a 40-foot copper dome and completed before the Great Depression?
Around the corner in Forest Park, the Missouri History Museum was bursting at the seams, flush with photographs and artifacts, newspapers and oversized reference books. It needed a storage solution, one that would keep its items safe but accessible.
“We had been looking for some time,” says Emily Jaycox, a librarian with the Missouri Historical Society Library and Research Center.
The historical society — with funds from a tax increase and private donations — spent about $10 million on the purchase and restoration, including a 54,000-square-foot storage annex.
When the library was dedicated in 1991, Rabbi Jerome Grollman remarked that the blond-bricked custodian of local history “has always been, and now shall remain, a house of learning.”
Every day, Jaycox says, visitors pore over maps, manuscripts and original documents. Whispers resonate around the rotunda in hushed echoes.
“We have a lot of people doing history of their family, or interested in the history of a building or a neighborhood,” she says.
Not at the moment, though. The library closed in August to construct “high-density” shelving to accommodate its growing collection. It is expected to reopen next month.
Jaycox can’t wait. “People love being in this space that is so well cared for,” she says.
Prospects for ambitious developers or out-of-the-box craftsmen are growing. Decades of suburban sprawl and a washing-away of religious identity has left corner churches, landmark cathedrals and century-old synagogues without worshippers, especially in the urban core. A 2020 Pew Research Center study found that 30% of Americans identify as religiously unaffiliated, compared to 5% in the 1970s.
Vacancies are expected to skyrocket this year when the Archdiocese of St. Louis reduces its 178 parishes by at least half. They will join a stock of previously closed Catholic churches, mostly clustered in the city and its nearest suburbs.
Some of those churches have already buckled under the weight of neglect. A few have had short-lived second acts, such as St. Boniface in Carondelet, which operated for a decade as the Ivory Theatre before being donated to a now-shuttered charter school.
St. Augustine, a Gothic Revival cathedral in the Hyde Park neighborhood, celebrated its final Mass almost 45 years ago. Time and vandalism had taken a toll when it caught the attention of Brittany and Chris Gloyd of Arnold in late 2019.
They bought the building for a dollar and three years of back taxes totaling about $7,000, with the hope that it would become the focal point of a nonprofit, Project Augustine, that would serve north St. Louis.
But fundraising to restore the cathedral — estimated to cost $3 million to $5 million — was underwhelming, Brittany Gloyd says, and the couple was determining late last year whether they could continue.
Then a fire in early December dealt what may have been a fatal blow.
“Quite frankly, it would take a miracle,” Gloyd said last month.
Other developers — working in bustling neighborhoods or with sounder infrastructure — have had better fortunes.
For 30 years, the owners of Patty Long Catering have operated 9th Street Abbey, once Holy Trinity Slovak Catholic Church, in Soulard. Receptions there don’t require much decorating, says event coordinator Madeline Galla. The vaulted ceilings, stained-glass windows and bell tower do most of the heavy lifting.
“Less is more in this space,” she says.
The number of couples exchanging vows each year at Main Street Abbey in Columbia, Illinois, rivals that of the marriages presided over during its first life, as Immaculate Conception Catholic Church, now located about 3 miles away.
“It’s very elegant,” says general manager Ryan Mendoza. “It’s the church feel without it being a church.”
The Abbey, which opened in 2018, is converting the old school, turning classrooms into a hotel and the wood-floored gymnasium into a sports bar. The cafeteria will become — what else? — a restaurant.
Sometimes, alums of Immaculate Conception, which dates to 1873, stop by to take a peek.
The same thing happens at the Ferguson Community Center.
“It’s neat when they come around,” says David Musgrave, the director of parks and recreation for the city.
In 2012, the Archdiocese consolidated Blessed Teresa of Calcutta — already a conglomeration of several north St. Louis County parishes — onto one site and sold the property on Smith Avenue to the city of Ferguson for $1.5 million. Another $3.6 million was spent to upgrade the 10-acre campus into a community center with a workout area, internet cafe, auditorium and multipurpose rooms. The stained-glass sanctuary became a banquet facility.
The total price tag was less than half of what new construction would be, then-Mayor James Knowles III said at the time.
Perhaps no vision has seemed as far-fetched as the one industrial designer Dave Blum and builder Bryan Bedwell had for St. Liborius in north St. Louis. The Gothic Revival relic from the 19th century, once boasting a robust German Catholic population, had fallen into disrepair even before the Archdiocese decommissioned it in 1992.
Twenty years later, the cathedral was teetering on the precipice. Windows had been shattered; copper, torn out. Rain poured through a hole in the roof, feeding a lake that rotted the floor. The walls were painted with mold.
Amid that spectacular mess, Blum and Bedwell pictured air walks, kick turns and flip tricks: Sk8 Liborius. They acquired the complex 11 years ago from the Karen House, a homeless shelter that had been using the convent next door.
“The whole place is a story,” Blum says.
The new chapter began with a massive cleanout. Ten dumpsters were hauled away with the detritus of decades of Catholic life: broken pews and candelabras, plastic sculptures and an altar table with one leg missing.
Little by little, repairs were made. Rails and ramps went in. Murals went up. Youngsters earned skate time by learning how to tuckpoint and weld. Admissions to underground raves and punk shows funded the progress.
“Sometimes you have to ask for forgiveness rather than permission,” Blum says.
In 2016, a nonprofit was formed to focus on youth outreach, especially in the arts and the skilled trades. A GoFundMe campaign has raised more than $100,000.
The Sk8 Liborius team still has a long way to go. Blum estimates it will take a million dollars to bring the building to code and open to the public. Skaters will be able to buy memberships or drop-in passes. Programming for teens and young adults will cover printmaking, woodworking, videography and construction.
Volunteer labor and a learn-as-you-go ethos has lengthened the timeline but held down costs.
“Adaptive reuse is difficult compared to conventional construction,” Blum says. “But that’s what saved us.”
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