The Scaffold Around the Church: A Baltimore Story

 

In the heart of midtown Baltimore at the corner of St. Paul and Chase, the scaffolding around the church has been up sufficiently long enough that some long time residents have forgotten when it wasn't there. I can't even quite name the building that it encloses: is it the former Christ Church, the former New Refuge Deliverance Cathedral, or the still fledgling New Life Evangelical Church of Olivet Assembly, who bought the building at auction in 2021?  What we do know is that the scaffold was placed there to protect the pedestrians walking by. 

The church is a safety hazard. After years of battles with the city over code violations and fines, New Refuge agreed to sell the building in 2019. The first auction sought over $1 million, and failed to find a buyer. The second auction brought in $550,000, a fairly meagre sum for a large Mount Vernon property. The buyer, Olivet Assembly, promised to remove the scaffolding by the end of 2021 and install a new, thriving congregation. Eighteen months later, the scaffolding is still there. 

As a safety precaution, scaffolding is hardly desirable, and this one has been up since 2013. Through repeated code violations, promises to sell the building, and promises to repair, the scaffolding endures. 

How did we get here, that demonstrably beautiful property was allowed to decay and become an eyesore that itself is a headline? The answer is nearly as old as Baltimore itself.

Part I: Christ Church, Baltimore

In 1796, during the waning days of the Washington administration, Saint Paul's Church, located on a handsome plot at "Lot 19" for over eight decades (and which it still occupies), decided it was time to create a chapel for the expanding city. They purchased the relatively new German Reformed Church, which was building a larger meetinghouse, on Front Street next to the Jones Falls. We have no images of this building, but UMBC's IRC reconstruction of 1815 Baltimore depicts it as a meetinghouse design with a steeple, making it somewhat more visible than its parent church to the north, whose churchyard was its most distinctive feature. The chapel was granted parish status in 1829, and began plans to build a new structure a couple of blocks to the west at what is now the southeast corner of Fayette and Gay Street. 

Christ Church 

at Fayette and Gay St.

 A Neoclassical edifice was erected and consecrated in 1834. While closer to its mother church, the increasing population density of the area ensured that both would be healthy. Indeed, between the moderately sized Christ Church, the formal, mammoth St. Paul's (with capacity for 1600 congregants), and the evangelical St. Peter's, Episcopalians of any stripe would find a place downtown. This building served Christ Church for 38 years, and had an after-life nearly as long.

The interior of the former Christ Church
after 1872

In 1853, a group of parishioners who had moved uptown to the new Mount Vernon neighborhood (about a mile to the north) founded Emmanuel Church at Read and Cathedral Streets. Just two years earlier, St. Peter's (located at what is now the University of Maryland Medical Center on Sharp Street) had founded Grace Chapel at the corner of Park Avenue and Monument Street, less than two blocks away from Emmanuel. Finally, following the Civil War, Christ Church made the decision to move north itself, to a new location at Chase and St. Paul. There were now three Episcopal parishes with capacity for over 2000 worshippers within seven blocks of each other in Mount Vernon. Just to the south, Old Saint Paul's had room for another 700, while the former Christ Church building was renamed the Church of the Messiah, and had as many has 500 members. Messiah continued at the Fayette Street site for another 48 years, even after the 1834 building was destroyed in the Great Baltimore Fire of 1904. It was not until 1920 that the congregation left downtown, moving to its present location on Harford Road.

The new Christ Church was designed by the firm of Baldwin and Price. E. Francis Baldwin is best known today as as the head architect of the B&O railroad, whose work included the Baltimore Roundhouse, Camden Yards Warehouse, Mount Royal Station, and many other train stations throughout the B&O system. Baldwin was a devout Catholic, and his designs also included St. Leo's and St. Ann's in Baltimore, as well as the early campus buildings of Catholic University in Washington. His mark on Baltimore also includes City College High School and the Hultzler Brothers Palace Building.

Christ Church was a rare Episcopal commission. Stylistically, it is is similar to his design for St. Ann's on Greenmount Avenue, as well as the original conception of Emmanuel Church by his former colleagues Nielsen and  Niernsee. With seating for 750, and another 50 in the west gallery, the church made a statement about the permanence of not only the parish, but of American Anglicanism itself. Along with Price (who perhaps is best remembered as the father of Emily Post!), they created an entire block, with stylistically matched rowhomes next door.

The church split almost immediately after the move. Episcopalians had been caught up in "churchmanship" controversies since the 1840s. Christ Church had always sided with the "low church," Protestant-leaning faction. When the parish called the Rev'd. William Kirkus in 1875 from Grace Church, New York, they were not expecting a high-church, Anglo-Catholic reformer. Within two years, Kirkus departed to the mission of St. Michael and All Angels, about ten blocks to the north, in the new neighborhood of Charles Village. He took a portion of the congregation with him. 

                               Emmanuel Church                               
Founded by members of Christ Church in 1853,
it became the most "fashionable" of 
the three Mount Vernon parishes.

In just under 25 years, Christ Church had divided itself four ways. Even so, the parish remained numerically strong enough through the Second World War to thrive, and still held spot in the Baltimore social register. Along with Emily Post, the parish was the home of Wallis Simpson, for whom King Edward VIII would abdicate his throne in 1936. Simpson attended Christ Church with her grandmother,  was confirmed there, and married her first husband there in 1916. Not without resources, Tiffany windows were installed alongside more traditional English glass, and the parish installed a new Holtkamp organ as late as 1959.  Mount Vernon was quickly changing, though, as urbanization and white flight chipped away at all of the churches in the neighborhood. Christ Church was not only weaker in membership and endowments than the other Episcopal parishes, but its lack of a clear "personality,"- not modern, not Anglo-Catholic, just traditional low church, was not enough to attract members to what would need to become a destination parish.

By the 1980s, the church Vestry made the decision to use its remaining endowment for programming, in hopes of rebuilding the congregation under an energetic Englishman, Rev'd. Winthrop Brainerd. This was the age of Baltimore's commercial decline: Stewart's Department Store had closed in 1978, Hochschild-Kohn in 1984, and Hultzler's was in its final months. Even while expanding its programming, the parish could not stem the tide. (I remember hearings stories of Evensong being performed to an empty church!) A merger with the considerably wealthier Anglo-Catholic Mount Calvary was explored but to no avail. In the end, there were 61 members remaining, and the Vestry voted to close, having spent down its $600,000 endowment in little under ten years.

The final services of Christ Church were held in 1986, and the strange afterlife of its building will be the subject of next week's entry.