I’ve put off writing about this subject for years, out of the belief that it would bring unwanted attention to a place that did not need the wrong type of attention. And I’m still not going to divulge the location of the church I’m about to talk about, though I’m sure that some readers will sadly recognize it as a place where they made many fond memories. It’s an old Roman Catholic church, closed back in the final decades of the 20th century, and like many of those grand old edifices, was acquired by devoted and well-meaning congregations who became the new stewards of what are extremely expensive buildings to maintain. Unfortunately, over the last 11 years that I’ve been documenting the City of St. Louis, I’ve noticed an alarming number of churches go dark, and I’ve been careful to keep the locations of those closed buildings secret so they’re not the victims of what I’m about to show you.
At this point, the copper thieves and “urban explorers” have already found the august old church that I first saw back in 2007, so I see little need to hide it from them. Like I said, its location is not important, but rather perhaps we should call it “Everychurch” in the mode of the medieval “Everyman” trope. The church is in the Gothic Revival Style, like so many houses of worship in St. Louis are, and it is brick, like most churches outside of the central corridor are. Sure, it saved money, but it also harkened back to the home countries of the immigrants who worshipped inside it; brick was common in Northern Europe, and I like how it contrasts with the cut stone or terracotta accents. This church was actually hit by a tornado, and was more ornate originally, but I like the simpler design of the current iteration.
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I decided to start photographing the church every year, in different weather and at different times of the day, to capture the passage of time. I even met a couple of the members of the small congregation who had purchased the huge church; they were friendly, but related stories of how the building had been attacked by the copper thieves. In the words of one of them, as he paused from his work cutting the front lawn, “I mean, this is a church. Why do they have to steal from a church?”
I thought the same thing, as I watched how the copper thieves had slowly, inexorably stripped the metal from even the most ridiculously high parapets of the church. They were so brazen in their crimes I even saw the ladders and ropes the thieves used lying on the roof on one occasion. Their singular interest in stealing every last bit of copper, no matter the risk of falling one hundred feet to their death, confused me; if someone is going to break the law to steal copper, there are plenty of abandoned houses scattered throughout the city where you can just walk in through the back door. What possesses someone to climb one hundred feet in the air, using a knotted rope to get that one piece of copper? One time, the police caught them up in the attic of the building, but they wouldn’t come out, so they had to bring in the fire department’s ladder truck to bring them down. Strange criminals, indeed.
The indignity of the copper being stolen has a second malevolent effect: water damage. Looking through the windows, the damage to the beautiful groin vaults is evident; they have fallen to the floor in a mess of plaster and wood lath. The slate roof tiles which protected the interior of the church for a century are still largely intact, but many of them were ripped off in the process of their copper neighbors being pulled off. The terracotta has begun to fall off, crashing on the ground below the front façade. But I am suspicious. I know what the terracotta looked like originally, and there is not enough rubble on the ground to account for simple deterioration due to the weather. I suspect someone has been stealing the terracotta, as well.
When out of town visitors from the East Coast or even Europe contact me wanting the “Chris Naffziger Tour” of the city, I always take them to this church. They all have the same reaction: what is wrong with St. Louis? I tell them, I wish knew.
Chris Naffziger writes about architecture at St. Louis Patina. Contact him via email at [email protected].
