Philadephia’s White Elephants

from anglicansunited.com by cherie

[Ed. Note:  Empty Church buildings deemed as white elephants.  This is true in Philadelphia and in many other large cities across the US.  Cheryl M. Wetzel]

http://articles.philly.com/2012-08-13/news/33168229_1_philadelphia-churches-congregation-real-estate

August 13, 2012

|By David O’Reilly, Inquirer Staff Writer

Hunger, health care, and urban violence are the usual subjects of concern when the Religious Leaders Council of Greater Philadelphia gathers for its semiannual meetings.

But at the spring 2011 session, a new topic was cast into the mix: real estate.

A member noted that he was grappling with a growing stock of vacant churches. Hoping for a solution from his high-placed peers at the conference table, he got instead a chorus of me-toos.

“I always thought I could sell my buildings to you,” a prelate of one Protestant denomination joked to another.
The group erupted in laughter.

“But it was kind of sick humor,” Episcopal Bishop Charles E. Bennison Jr. recalled. “We all have these empty buildings now. We’re all in trouble.”

They are costly to maintain and increasingly difficult to sell, but painful to demolish, even as they decay into neighborhood eyesores. There are now so many shuttered houses of worship – at least 300 estimated across the Philadelphia region – that the anxiety over what to do with them has spread beyond religious circles and into City Hall and suburban town councils.

One real estate website, LoopNet.com, had 16 Philadelphia churches listed for sale last week, ranging in size from 1,700 to 52,000 square feet, and in price from $110,000 to $5.2 million.

Among them is a 6,775-square-foot edifice in Society Hill, built of tan brick and topped by a copper cross and onion domes. In Frankford, a tall, gray stone Gothic-style church in “poor to very poor” condition can be had for $250,000.

An additional 64, ranging from storefronts to stately giants, are on LoopNet’s site but unpriced.
The surfeit is “a big problem that does not lend itself to any ordinary solutions,” said Philadelphia Deputy Mayor Alan Greenberger, an architect and executive director of the city planning commission.

The soaring steeples, lofty ceilings, vaulted arches, and stained glass that imbue religious structures with a sense of sacred singularity, he said, also make them “difficult to readopt” to other uses.

A different time

On the Main Line, the hollow presence of the First Baptist Church of Ardmore, closed last year and threatened with demolition, is prompting the Lower Merion Township commissioners to write an ordinance easing the way for developers to convert houses of worship to commercial and residential use.

First Baptist’s demise is not an anomaly.