Though it doesn’t look like all that much now, Quinn Chapel has stood in the Carondelet neighborhood for 160 years. Today, however, the city will begin the process of tearing it down. That’s even though several neighbors say they’re interested in buying the dilapidated structure and preserving it in some way.
There’s just one problem. Despite Quinn’s sorry state, its current owner doesn’t seem interested in selling.
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“There’s been a number of people in the community who have approached [the owner],” says Matthew Goodleaf, who lives just a block away and who, along with his wife, is actively working to preserve a different historic building in the neighborhood. “His cell phone number is not accepting calls from people he doesn’t know. He’s not responding to texts, he’s not responding to emails.”
City records list the owner as Quinn Chapel African Methodist Episcopal Church. Edmund Lowe, the presiding elder of the Missouri Conference of the St. Louis and Cape Girardeau District of the A.M.E. church, previously told SLM, “We’d be willing to part ways with the building” and acknowledged they’d gotten offers for it. But interested buyers say Lowe is not responding to their calls, emails and texts. (Nor did he respond to SLM’s for this story.)
Quinn was originally constructed as the North Public Market in the late 1860s. A Black Christian congregation bought the property 20 years later. For the next century, the church hosted fish fries, ice cream socials, lectures, and songfests. But by the 2010s, Quinn Chapel was abandoned. In February 2025, the structure suffered a catastrophic blaze.
Quinn sits in Alderwoman Anne Schweitzer’s Ward 1. She and her legislative aide, Christian Bishop, went to great lengths to get the building off the city’s tax-exempt rolls. Even though a nonprofit church owns it, the building is not being used for nonprofit purposes and therefore, the city says, it needs to pay property taxes. It was hit with a $712 tax bill for last year—a paltry sum, but one that if the owners don’t pay, would allow the city to sell the building at a tax sale as soon as next year.
But that likely won’t be soon enough to save the structure.
The building has code violations. A condemnation sign is affixed to its front door. Squatters set fires inside it to keep warm. It’s considered a safety risk. The city is starting to take bids on its demolition Monday. An unfortunate fact is that it’s much easier, legally, for the city to take action to demolish a dangerous building than to seize it for redevelopment. If the city goes through with the demolition, the unsafe structure would be removed—although any possible redevelopment of the vacant site would rest on the absentee owner becoming responsive (or, again, a tax sale, if they don’t make good on the taxes that are due).
Schweitzer says she wants to see it saved and restored, but “in its current condition, it’s unsafe and unsightly,” she says.
She adds that the building is indicative of a larger problem in which private property owners expect the city to manage the upkeep of their buildings for them, to the detriment of the surrounding neighborhood.
“Private property owners have the responsibility to keep up their properties. The city has a responsibility to keep up its properties. When negligent property owners force the city to try to do both, neither type of property is getting enough attention so both suffer,” she says. “We have seen too many examples of this across the first ward.”
Goodleaf says he’s heard of at least two other attempts to purchase the property, all of which hit the dead end of an incommunicado owner. There was talk of turning it into a space that could host a farmers’ market. Someone else had the idea to turn it into an ice cream parlor. Some of those conversations—as well as failed attempts to reach the owner—were taking place before fire gutted the building.
Goodleaf says he’s still interested. While he’s not a developer, he knows about historic preservation. He and his wife own the Kennon House, which is actually older than Quinn by a few years. A website they created for the property describes it as “the best-preserved carpenter gothic structure in the city of St. Louis.” Though when it comes to Quinn, Goodleaf acknowledges that given the city’s timetable for demolition, it’s looking like it will take a miracle.
“I just don’t know that there’s time. Unless they reached out to me in a call today and said, ‘Hey, let’s make this happen.’ Maybe we could turn it around. But short of that, we’re just out of time.”
