Historic Carondelet church was nearly saved—but fire had other plans

For more than 160 years, Quinn Chapel stood in the Carondelet neighborhood, erected when that neighborhood was its own independent city separate from St. Louis. Built as the one-story, brick North Public Market in the late 1860s, the building was bought by a Black Christian congregation just 20 years later. People worshiped there for the next hundred years. 

During that century, the church hosted fish fries, ice cream socials, lectures, and songfests. When the Mississippi flooded in the 1940s, two dozen Illinoisans left their homes across the river and lived at the church for several weeks. The building was added to the National Register of Historic Places as part of the Central Carondelet Historic District in 1974. According to its application to the registry, at the time Quinn Chapel AME Church had been a continuous place of worship for 92 years.   

But by the 2010s, Quinn Chapel was sitting abandoned. 

The building is something of a sore spot for both Alderwoman Anne Schweitzer, in whose Ward 1 Quinn Chapel resides, as well as her legislative aide Christian Bishop. Dealing with vacant properties and chasing down derelict owners fill a lot of both their schedules. They had been making good progress on this one.

“There are so many vacancies,” Schweitzer says. “Each has a different set of facts. One occasionally needs a creative solution.” 

Oftentimes, at least for Ward 1, that creative solution comes from Bishop. 

All sorts of concerns about vacant properties come into Schweitezer’s office—everything from worries about a structure falling over to empty buildings being used for crime to unkempt lawns becoming eyesores. Bishop’s first step is usually to figure out how to get in contact with a building owner. That’s not always an easy task. He routinely has to figure out who’s behind out-of-state limited liability companies. He digs through bankruptcy filings. He combs through news articles and social media. Sometimes the listed owner has passed away, in which case obituaries naming next of kin are invaluable. “Each property is a unique case,” he says. 

A few years ago, Bishop started chipping away at the Quinn Chapel vacancy case. 

At that time, in December 2024, Quinn Chapel African Methodist Episcopal Church was still the building’s listed owner, and because it had long operated as a place of worship, it was exempt from city property tax. But, abandoned, the buliding was now among the dozens of city properties sitting empty and not generating tax revenue. Bishop found that the church’s registration with the Missouri Secretary of State had lapsed. An organization with a similar name, an AME church in Jefferson City, was still active and “out of an abundance of caution,” the city assessor reached out to the congregation, but got no response. At this point the city put the building back on the tax rolls at the start of this year, a step it regularly takes for buildings no longer being used for tax-exempt purposes. (Being owned by a nonprofit is not enough.) 

With that, the owners got a $700 tax bill. When it comes to getting vacant and abandoned property into new hands, even a pittance likely makes all the difference. Who wants to pay anything to keep possession of a property they’ve left forgotten? 

Charging taxes can also start a short clock ticking down to the city being able to sell the building at a land sale. That’s because, under normal circumstances, a building owner needs to be three years delinquent on their property taxes before the city can sell the property. But that timeline shrinks to just one year if the building has code violations, as Quinn Chapel did.

So, thanks to Bishop’s sleuthing, the Quinn Chapel’s owners could be forced to give up the building, allowing it to be sold to a new owner as soon as January of next year—something the building’s owner would have been amenable to. Edmund Lowe is the presiding elder of the Missouri Conference of the St. Louis and Cape Girardeau District of the A.M.E. church. He says that the congregation who once worshiped at Quinn is still intact, though they only number around 15 now, and they use space in a church near Creve Coeur area. He stresses that while the history of Quinn Chapel in South City would be maintained, “The building itself we don’t have any use for.”

“We’d be willing to part ways with the building,” he says, adding that the congregation had gotten offers to buy it in the past, though he didn’t go into details. 

There is just one problem, something that happened while Schweitzer and Bishop were working on the issue last year.

“In the meantime, people set the building on fire,” Schweitzer says.

In February 2025, the structure suffered a catastrophic blaze. It’s one of a number of historic churches in the area that have become charred husks of their former selves. Right now, all its windows and most of its roof are non-existent, leaving the building completely exposed to the elements. A couch, a mattress, and copious litter inside suggest the site has become a common spot for squatters. 

So when the building is able to be put up for auction next year, any potential buyer is going to be purchasing a pile of bricks rather than a historic church. Even worse, that pile of bricks is on the National Historic Register, meaning that demolition and any other extensive changes need the city’s Cultural Resources Office to sign off—an extra step added onto an already arduous task.

Fortunately, not all of Bishop’s and Schweitzer’s work on vacancies end in this sort of heartbreaking loss.

They were recently able to get a vacant Bevo Mill two-family out of the hands of its absentee owner and into the hands of the Tower Grove Community Development Corporation. A six-family building not far from Quinn sat vacant for four years until recently. A “nudge” from Schweitzer‘s office as well as a few unhappy neighbors proved enough to get the owner to sell to someone new, who is in the process of rehabbing the units right now.

The St. Louis City Assessor’s office also plans to review nearly two dozen properties flagged in SLM’s previous reporting as being vacant and non-tax generating.   

Bishop says he and Schweitzer are putting together a process to streamline the process by which aldermen flag potential problematic vacant properties to the Assessor’s Office. “We’re working on it,” he says.