Developers Partner With Preservationists To Save Houses of Worship

This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.

The New York Sun

Churches and synagogues that have anchored neighborhoods for decades are deteriorating all over New York, victims of many forces, including changing demographics, increasing secularism, and years of disinvestment. Although some cannot be saved, congregants and preservationists argue that there’s a powerful technique for protecting others: sensitive development that uses various tools, like the transfer of development rights, to preserve a house of worship while building profitable housing to pay for it.

The most acclaimed example is probably St. Theresa’s on the Lower East Side, an 1842 Gothic Church that sold a parking lot and air rights over the church in 1999 to the Hudson Companies, which then built an 83-unit market-rate apartment building nearby. Developer Alan Bell said the key was their ability to use the zoning to produce a larger building than would otherwise have been allowed. In addition, the residential market was very strong, with the result that the units rented immediately, even at rents up to $4,000 a month. He warns that the model works best for churches sited on “a large footprint” and is relatively hard to apply to more confined churches, like nearby St. Brigid’s, which the Archdiocese of New York intends to demolish.

Harlem developer Ken Haron, president of Artimus Construction, had made a similar offer to the Archdiocese last year, in the hope of saving St. Thomas the Apostle, a huge church that had been shut down and padlocked by the Archdiocese in 2003.St.Thomas is widely regarded as one of the most beautiful churches in New York. “Rising over the tough edges of St. Nicholas Avenue like a fantastic lace scrim,” St. Thomas is even more awesome inside, wrote David Dunlap in “From Abyssinian to Zion: A Guide to Manhattan’s Houses of Worship.”

As the developer of the 64-unit Rosa Parks Condominiums across St. Nicholas Avenue, Mr. Haron had approached St. Thomas’s pastor in 2003 with an offer of assistance. “Usually when we do construction in an area we go to the churches and see if we can help out. St. Thomas was a magnificent asset for the neighborhood, and I was pretty shocked when the priest told me that the Archdiocese wanted to close it down, that it didn’t want to spend the money to take care of it. I’m not Catholic, but I was disturbed.”

For one thing, while St. Thomas had been reduced to only 100 or so congregants, its numbers would surely go up as the neighborhood came back. Mr. Haron provided the Archdiocese with a full list of the projects that were being built nearby, estimating that more than 1,000 families would move in within five years. He noted that if just 20% of new residents were Catholic, St. Thomas could have a healthy congregation. “In fact, I underestimated the timetable. The neighborhood already has 850 new families, a couple of years early,” Mr. Haron said. “But St. Thomas is still slated for demolition.”

Mr. Haron offered to help with St. Thomas’s upkeep while its more serious problems were addressed. “I’ll bring in my roofer, my engineers, we’ll take it from there,” he recalls saying to the pastor, who got back to him a few days later saying he had “hit a wall” with the Archdiocese. They told him not to speak to Mr. Haron again. But neighborhood residents and the New York Landmarks Conservancy, the city’s foremost activist preservation group, found him and proposed that they work together. Mr. Haron calculated that the market value of the Archdiocesan holdings – the full square footage, the air rights, and everything else – came to $9 million. His group offered the Archdiocese $7.2 million and persuaded the city’s Department of Housing Preservation and Development to give them an adjacent lot that would allow them to build a 90-unit mixed-income development. “The proposal was to give the church $2 million just to start its renovation, while the eventual income would come from the housing development,” Mr. Haron said.

It certainly looks like a good real estate deal for the Archdiocese, which would have retained ownership of the property, merely leasing it to Mr. Haron’s group for 50 years. But the Archdiocese wasn’t interested. The president of the Landmarks Conservancy, Peg Breen, said “They eventually told us it wasn’t going to happen – that they had their own plans for the property.”

Angry parishioners and residents continue protests in front of St. Thomas, which remains padlocked. “What does the Archdiocese care about a community and its heritage?” asks filmmaker and parishioner Eric V. Tait, who grew up in the parish and attended its school. “It’s just barbaric.”

With its 410 churches the Archdiocese is the largest religious property owner in New York, and one that has managed to elude individual designations by the Landmarks Preservation Commission. While St. Veronica’s in Greenwich Village was designated last year as part of the Greenwich Village Historic District Extension, no Catholic church has been individually designated in 27 years. The commission has held hearings on designating two Harlem churches, All Saints and St. Aloysius, but has not yet scheduled a vote.

Far smaller than the Archdiocese is the Presbytery of New York City, which owns 98 churches – for which there are a total of 18,000 Presbyterians. The math is clearly disastrous. Some churches will have to be closed or redeveloped. The West Park Presbyterian Church, at the corner of Amsterdam Avenue and 86th Street on the activist Upper West Side, has been negotiating with developers – and with its neighbors – for two years. Finished in 1884,the five-story red sandstone church is “one of the finest Romanesque sanctuaries in Manhattan,” Mr. Dunlap said. But it has long been deteriorating, with chunks of the soft decorative sandstone periodically tumbling to the ground. Repairs are estimated to cost up to $8 million – an impossible sum for the fewer than 100 parishioners who are left. Neighborhood residents immediately joined forces with preservationists – Landmark West and the Landmarks Conservancy – to raise money to help rebuild the church and to negotiate a more amenable building than the 24-story tower initially proposed by the Related Companies. But the building has exactly the same problem cited by Mr. Bell: The footprint is too confining. Building a tower will require demolishing part or all of the church.

But the worst plight may belong to the small churches outside Manhattan, like the Astoria Presbyterian Church in Queens. Opened in 1846, the Greek Revival building is now squeezed by development on both sides. The congregation would like to demolish the church and build HUD-funded senior housing on the site. The director of the Sacred Sites Program for the Landmarks Conservancy, Ann-Isabel Friedman, notes that the State Historic Preservation Office could ask HUD to deny the funds. “The state office would like to save the church,” she said. “But if there’s not a viable alternative, and the church is out of money, and it’s closing, the state office will step back and ask, well, can’t you at least design a good building?”


The New York Sun

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