Print

Email story

Comment

Email editor

Old houses of worship don't die; they are transformed

The new onwer of the small white church on Kentucky Avenue plans two loft apartments and townhomes for the property.

By SUE CARLTON
Published April 23, 2006

Almost every day, I pass by a small white church on Kentucky Avenue, not far from downtown Tampa.

The sign out front once advertised topical Bible verses and Sunday school hours. Tampa Primitive Baptist Church, it says.

For a while now, the church has been silent and empty. But long-timers in this old city neighborhood can still tell you stories of the church's former life.

Built in the 1940s, this was one of the chapels for soldiers at Drew Field, where Tampa International Airport is now. After the war, a Primitive Baptist association bought the church. Because there was no bridge, they had to float it across the Hillsborough River to move it.

Some mornings, I walk up the faded red steps to look through the glass panes of the locked oak doors and into the sanctuary. Even from outside, you can smell musty church smells of old wood and hymnals.

Once, brides and grooms ran down these steps, rice raining around them. Worshipers filled the church back then. During lengthy sermons, restless kids probably peered out the long sunlit windows on each side. Babies were baptized, hymns sung. Outside on the lawn, they ate suppers on long tables spread with linens.

That was a long time ago. Members of the church got older, and no young ones came to replace them. No one was left to fill the collection plates or trim the shrubs or fix the roof. In the end, only a few might make it to services.

"I'm 57, and I was the youngest person there," says David Keene, who went to the church since childhood. "Everybody grew up and went away."

Last year, they gave in and sold the old church for $100,000. The buyer took his plans for the property to the City Council.

For a while, nothing happened at the church. It sat peacefully empty.

One day I came around the corner to see workers with their tools and their giant metal trash bins beginning to fill with construction debris.

I looked inside and the pews were gone. Then the big stained glass pieces were too.

Days later, down came the mural of the River Jordan, painted long ago on the side of the baptismal tank, a backdrop for the pastor.

But the worst never happened. I never had to see the walls come down.

As it turns out, change and progress might be the very things that save this church, or at least keep it from disappearing forever.

Manuel Sanchez, a general contractor and engineer who bought the property, is putting two loft apartments inside the sanctuary. He has plans for three townhomes on the rest of the property.

The building will look much as it did back in the 1940s. The tall, curved archways that form the high ceiling, the exposed beams, the steeple will all stay. Sanchez is planning to reinstall the stained glass inside.

Walk with him through the church and he runs a hand along the old oak beams, talking about how solid they are. "It does have good karma," he says.

Sanchez is working with an architect who worked on a sprawling, century-old church that's been turned into to an apartment building called The Sanctuary in Tampa Heights.

It's a glorious, grand old structure of brick, stained glass and dark wooden church doors, now an arty sort of enclave. It's a kind of preservation in a weathered neighborhood, saving a building worth saving.

In another neighborhood nearby, change is coming to the little white church on the corner. It won't be a church anymore, but it will be more than a memory.

[Last modified April 23, 2006, 20:39:02]