The Rev. Francis X. Mazur, right, Wednesday points out details of the former St. Gerard Catholic Church at Delavan and Bailey avenues to the Rev. David M.Dye of Georgia.
Posted on 09/17/2009 9:54:46 AM PDT by NYer
The Rev. Francis X. Mazur, right, Wednesday points out details of the former St. Gerard Catholic Church at Delavan and Bailey avenues to the Rev. David M.Dye of Georgia.
St. Gerard Catholic Church, open for a century before the doors shut after last year’s final Mass, has attracted a priest now raising $15 million to take the place apart this spring and rebuild it outside Atlanta.
Wednesday, church and architectural representatives from Georgia were in Buffalo to build public support and attend an evening forum about church reuse, organized by the nonprofit Preservation Buffalo Niagara and held in Unitarian Universalist Church on Elmwood Avenue.
Beforehand, the Rev. David Dye, pastor of Mary Our Queen Catholic Church in Norcross, Ga., stopped to see St. Gerard’s on the corner of East Delavan and Bailey avenues.
This was his third trip to the city. It is sad, he said, to think about moving the church.
“It makes me even more sad to see this place empty when it could be in Atlanta filled with people,” he said standing by the white marble altar that will take an estimated five days to dismantle.
In his congregation of 750 families, people like the idea of moving St. Gerard’s to Atlanta. The city burned in the Civil War. Old buildings are rare.
“It’s kind of like being an organ donor,” Dye said.
The discussion he later joined as a panelist before an audience of 50 was intended to start a public conversation about how to reuse churches.
“I think all of us can apply ourselves for that planning for the future,” said Tanya Werbizky, of the Preservation League. She talked about an 1880s train station moved from the tracks to become a museum in her home town of Vestal near Binghamton.
“We try to keep an open mind,” she said of options between restoration and demolition.
One local preservationist who did not attend the session said he was “apoplectic” about a local church moving so far away. “That church belongs at Bailey and East Delavan and nowhere else,” said Tim Tielman, executive director of the Campaign for Greater Buffalo. The corner, where the former church pastor often found empty crack baggies on the sidewalk, needs “grace notes,” he said.
“They have some obligation to the people who donated money . . . People who saved up their nickels and dimes to build a community,” Tielman said of the German Catholics who built St. Gerard’s as a replica of St. Paul’s, outside Rome.
“Do you have a use for the church? Help me out,” said the Rev. Francis X. Mazur, the former pastor, when he heard the complaint.
The church now has small trees growing from the bell tower roof tiles and peeling paint over the stained-glass saints. The longer it stays empty, the more it will deteriorate, Mazur said.
Wednesday afternoon, Reese Buckner paused to look at the church from her car in a drugstore parking lot. Its imposing presence was a staple. She softened when she heard about the Georgia congregation and the plans to spend $500,000 to turn the church corner into a grassy park to be enjoyed by area residents.
“OK. Well, then it’s being used for a good purpose,” she said. “I like it all.”
St. Gerard's dates from 1911 and is an exuberant example of the classical style. The interior is spectacular, far exceeding what one would expect in a neighborhood parish.
The idea of moving it to Atlanta is fabulous! You could not build a new church to rival this one with that amount of money. They simply need to replace the heating system with air conditioning.
I grew up not too far from that location...It might as well move to Atlanta.
WRT the building itself, if somebody had a USE for the building where it stands, that would be one thing.
But the church is empty and deteriorating, and nobody has come forward with a plan or the funds to save it (particularly not Mr. Tielman, who has been complaining about this since it was first proposed but hasn't come up with ANY source of funds or ANY plan other than to just let the building rot in place.)
I think the original German Catholics who built the structure would be pleased if it were still being used for its original purpose. If it can't be where it stands, then somewhere else.
BTW, a tiny quibble: "In his congregation of 750 families, people like the idea of moving St. Gerard’s to Atlanta. The city burned in the Civil War. Old buildings are rare."
Can't really blame the writer because she doesn't know, but Norcross is nowhere near Atlanta in Civil War terms. The city didn't even exist until 1870, and there wasn't even a railroad there until later, so no reason for Sherman to burn anything in the vicinity. He didn't even pass through the area, since he approached Atlanta from the northwest and continued from there to the southeast.
Old buildings are rare in Norcross because it is a relatively new municipality, not because of William Tecumseh Sherman . . . .
I totally agree! See my comments above.
Link was busted. It's a lovely church.
The story says it was built as a replica of "St. Paul's, outside Rome."
It doesn't look much like the Basilica of St. Paul Without the Walls . . .
Some OTHER St. Paul's outside Rome, perhaps? Or outside Rome, New York?
I am impressed by the fact that it can be moved. Wow!
I’d much rather see a Catholic church moved and stay a Catholic church than be converted to a mosque or a Acorn building.
Computers make this job a whole lot easier. Also, not all components of the building will be moved. A new foundation will be poured in GA, and probably parts that are regularly replaced (roof slates, gutters, ordinary window glass) will not be transported.
Any interior furnishings and all the stained glass will be removed ahead of time and transported to storage pending reconstruction.
I'm glad I'm not in charge of the moving/reconstruction plan! Hopefully they will have good engineers on the job!
Forgotten Buffalo - St. Gerard's Parish
They repeat the story that it is a copy of St Paul Without-the-Walls (San Paulo fuori le mura). They must mean the interior, because the outside is nothing like. Both have a bell tower, but the designs are different.
By the way, this church has BELLS!!!!.
What fun that will be! That will require special handling - the bells will have to be removed from their cages, packed in special foam surrounds, and re-hung with new wood.
Since Fr. Dye is a former Anglican, he will know what to do with the bells!
Years ago my wife and I visited Dresden. They were in the process of reconstructed the Frauenkirche, which had been blown apart during the Dresden raid. They had stacks and stocks of individual stones they have dig up, and each was marked. They still had not finished restoration when we last visited, which was in 2001 but the outside was finished. They were going from the original plans .Amazing what they can do.
Any idea on how they will remove and transport the frescoes?
I'd say they meant the interior. It's a smaller version, but the structural design itself is nearly identical (down to the shape of the clerestory windows) and a good deal of the decoration is at least a homage to the original.
There is NO amount of money that could reproduce this interior work, and if it is left in place but unmaintained one unheated winter will damage it severely and once the roof fails that will finish it off. As one of Kipling's characters said, "Tis with housen as teeth. Let 'em go too far, and there's nothing to be done."
And the hard-line preservationists want the diocese to spend the hundreds of thousands of dollars just to heat and secure and repair an empty church -- but they have no suggestion as to what the diocese should DO with it other than just let it sit in a depressed and largely abandoned slum area of Buffalo waiting for some hypothetical buyer to come along, ten - twenty - fifty years from now. And then somebody will undoubtedly complain that the diocese is spending its money on "bricks and mortar" instead of whatever social justice project they think is imperative.
I don’t have a clue. Maybe they will use the original cartoons and repaint them?
IAC, it is a gorgeous building! I bless Father for doing this. He is the opposite of the blue noses who have been charge for so many years.
Some church art is splendid, some NOT so much so. It may be my personal preference, but I have an abhorrence for the weepy, over-romanticized German religious art of the late 19th and early 20th century -- judging from the stiffness of the figures, the lack of proportion, and the overall poor composition, this may not be the best place to spend a large part of the budget. IF they can find a decent traditional artist . . . .
I know that there are modern artists who can do better traditional work than that. The downtown Atlanta Shrine of the Immaculate Conception burned in the 1980s. It was completely gutted and the roof fell in -- they were able to save very little of the interior (they DID save the marble high altar, which is utterly gorgeous). The ceiling paintings of the Twelve Apostles were reinterpreted by a local artist from the originals, and it is very respectable work.
Sometimes old art is good . . . sometimes, it's just OLD.
Right about that.
The stained glass windows in the 160 y/o Methodist/Episcopal Church we purchased were deemed 'historic and worthy of preservation'. As you can imagine, the themes follow scripture and not the saints. For example, one window features 'Christ the Sower', another 'Christ knocking at the door'. The true gems in the collection are the 7 windows that make up the 'fenestration' along the front wall of the church. These are victorian masterpieces that include 'the sword of victory', the 'bible', descent of the Holy Spirit, the 'cross' and other scriptural themes. The windows contain victorian 'jewels', round and/or square cut glass that, when illuminated from behind, look like strings of jewels within the window's theme.
Having worked on this project for more than 5 years, when Father opened the church for me to see the restored windows, I broke down in tears. Many of them had been broken and boarded up for more than 50 years. In photographing them, it was difficult to see the patterns, much less the colors of the original glass which were covered with so many years of dirt. As the light pierced these windows, it was finally possible to see what the original artists had envisioned. Viewed at night from outside, they are absolutely breathtaking!
OK, you’ve got to get pics of those windows so we can enjoy them too!
I wonder if it would be possible to roll the paintings back in time to something that meshes better with the backward-looking style of the rest of the decoration (iow something more in the style of the original art in St. Paul without-the-walls) -- 13th c. mosaic work). Here is the Christ in Majesty from the apse of St. Paul's:
Here's a mosaic Coronation of the Virgin (the theme in St. Gerard Majella) from the same period, in Saint Mary Major in Rome:
Mosaic would probably be prohibitively expensive, but something painted in the more archaic and almost Byzantine style of this period of mosaic work might suit the rest of the architecture better.
Agree with your comments about Norcross. And while historic preservation was never a strong point in Atlanta, the loss of structures from that era (1911) can be charged to the Great Fire rather than the War. It appears that the writer is historically impaired when it comes to the South.
For Yankee readers: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Atlanta_fire_of_1917
My grandfather was here, attending GA Tech, at the time. They called out the cadet corps to help fight the fire, iirc.
Much of the Battle of Atlanta was fought over the same ground anyhow.
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