A RIGHTEOUS RESTORATION
By Philip Nyhuis
On a late summer day last year, a huge round net hung around the middle of the north steeple of the old stone church on the corner of Delaware and Tupper. Rigged like an inverted parachute, the net was designed to catch any materials falling from the 185-foot tower and prevent them from landing on the busy street corner below. A steeplejack was suspended by cable along the face of the steeple, carefully repointing the stone. The cable was weighted on the ground by a concrete monolith.
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Asbury is actually two rectangular buildings.
The building facing Delaware is the former sanctuary. The building that faces Tupper Street, the parish house, has a basement, first floor, and second floor. Photo by Jim Bush |
An erector set of scaffolding stretched up the south steeple. High above the street, workmen walked around on scaffold boards raising and lowering buckets and wheelbarrows of materials. Beside the church, rows of great cut stones were all tagged and numbered, like the artifacts of an archeological dig. The stones comprised the top of the 130-foot south tower, which had to be partially dismantled and then rebuilt. After decades of decay and years of despoiling, dithering, and threats of demolition, the historic Asbury Methodist Church was at last being rescued and restored.
The church, completed in 1876, was designed by John Selkirk, a prominent Buffalo architect whose only other extant legacy is the propped-up Romanesque façade of his 1859 Buffalo Gas Light Company building on lower Genesee Street behind City Hall. Originally called Delaware Avenue Methodist Church, it was renamed in 1917 when the church merged with the Asbury Methodist congregation. (Francis Asbury was a missionary dispatched to America by John Wesley, who founded Methodism in 1729 at Oxford University. In 1784 Asbury was ordained the first American Methodist Bishop.)
After the Methodists left in the early 1980s, the old church hit the skids. After two fly-by-night congregations (the Cornerstone Life Church and the Missionary Church of Christ, a Texas outfit) inhabited the building, the place was boarded up and left to the pigeons. In 1996, a city court judge issued an order of demolition after blocks of sandstone veneer fell from the north tower.
A city of at-risk churches
In Buffalo, beautiful old churches seem nearly as common as tall trees—on the corners, in the neighborhoods, overlooking the expressways, beside the downtown buildings and along the wide avenues. Many are architecturally noteworthy; some are awesome. Among the latter are the St. Paul’s and St. Joseph’s cathedrals, Our Lady of Victory Basilica, St. Louis, First Presbyterian, Corpus Christi, Unitarian Universalist, St. Gerard’s, Blessed Trinity, Trinity Episcopal, Westminster, and so many others. As the population moved to the suburbs and more of the remaining city congregations died off, many churches were boarded up. All over the city, there are abandoned churches, the congregations gone, the buildings crumbling. Some have been saved and converted to condos; others are warehouses. In a triumph of architectural recycling, the towering Our Lady of Sorrows on Genesee became the King Urban Life Center and Charter School. Corpus Christi has been rescued by community action and the arrival of the Pauline Fathers. Buffalo’s oldest surviving church structure, the former Breckenridge Street Church, built in 1827 and currently owned by Rich Products, still awaits a savior.
For Asbury, the savior was Righteous Babe Records (RBR) and its principals, composer and singer Ani DiFranco and her manager, Scot Fisher. In the summer of 1996, they formed the Citizens’ Committee to Save Asbury Church. The goal was to raise $150,000 to do the preliminary repairs necessary to stabilize the steeples. Through a combination of community support, some insurance money, and a donation from the Methodists, the repairs began and the city agreed not to tear down the church. “It’s the kind of building that in Europe would stand for a thousand years,” says Scot Fisher. “Here in Buffalo, a stone falls and we talk about demolition.”
Meanwhile, one of the evangelical churches had sold all the pews to a local antiques dealer. During their non-stewardship, panes of stained glass from the front window also disappeared. Before RBR’s involvement with Asbury, DiFranco had considered buying a studio in New Orleans. But after touring the church with Fisher, she decided to continue to invest in her hometown, save the landmark and convert the church to a performance space and offices for her company.
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An innovative re-use
Asbury is actually two rectangular buildings. The building facing Delaware is the former sanctuary. The building that faces Tupper Street, the parish house, has a basement, first floor, and second floor, and each floor is approximately 5,000 square feet. The plan is that Righteous Babe will create their offices on the second floor, rent out the first floor and basement to Hallwalls Contemporary Arts Center, and both will use the former sanctuary for performances.
According to Hallwalls Executive Director Ed Cardoni, the thirty-year-old arts organization plans to have its offices, screening room, and an intimate nightclub-type space in the basement and its gallery space on the first floor. Hallwalls will share with RBR the 1200-capacity sanctuary performance space with its box office, green room, and dressing rooms as well as the entrance lobby and stair tower, elevator, loading dock, and restrooms. Hallwalls is currently raising the $300,000 necessary to create its own facilities within the building.
Announcing the move, Cardoni observed that “the restoration and reclamation of an historic downtown landmark combined with the partnership of a successful for-profit music company and a renowned nonprofit arts center make this one of the most exciting projects happening in Buffalo. We feel fortunate to be a part of it.”
A big team for a big job
Kris Kemmis and Matt Mancuso of Architectural Resources are designing the new office spaces and the Hallwalls galleries in the parish house. With wide experience in historic renovation, the firm is also currently working on the H. H. Richardson complex on Forest Avenue. According to Kevin Murrett, president of Architectural Resources, the Asbury project has been a collaborative effort between his team, Righteous Babe, and Flynn Battaglia, the architectural firm hired by RBR to direct the exterior renovation and the sanctuary interior. “This is such a strategic project—uniting the Chippewa area with the Main Street theater district,” says Murrett.
So how do you turn an 1876 church into a 2004 office building and arts center? The first priority was, of course, stabilizing the building—re-pointing and rebuilding the towers, reconstructing the windows and entranceways, and repairing the roof.
The challenge for Flynn Battaglia was to incorporate modern systems into a building that was never intended to have air conditioning, fire alarms, or sprinkler systems; to creatively fit those into the building; and find ways to upgrade the current mechanical, electrical, and plumbing infrastructure—while still preserving as much of the historic fabric as possible.
“You want to be able to understand how the building was used originally and keep a lot of those beautiful finishes but at the same time balance that with the need for the new use,” says Peter Flynn of Flynn Battaglia. To assure the high quality of the restoration work, Flynn Battaglia turned to the Lehigh Construction Group, a general contractor with experience in many historic restorations, including the Roycroft Inn, Westminster Church, the Greek Hellenic Church, and the Buffalo Club. Lehigh, in turn, subcontracted the masonry, roofing, windows, and geothermal work.
New solutions
Jessie Schnell is a professional planner and preservationist who is the project manager for Flynn Battaglia on the Asbury project. As the liaison between the design and the construction, she oversees each step of the renovation and reconstruction and has a thorough understanding of the challenges involved. “The hardest part of the project has been integrating modern mechanical systems, modern safety, and modern accessibility,” says Schnell. “The design part is very natural. Scot and Ani have a vision of what the building should be that matches a lot of what the building already is. We want to preserve that as much as possible. For example, we can’t run anything through the walls. They’re all masonry walls, not the cavity walls people are used to. So we have to come up with new solutions.”
The stained glass windows were another challenge. RBR wanted to keep them but also protect them. Plexiglass was not an aesthetically possible option here. Instead, new custom storm windows were fashioned to unobtrusively protect the original stained glass. But this created another conundrum in that storm windows tend to create a heat pocket which, in the presence of leaded glass, can soften up the lead pane.
According to Lehigh Construction Supervisor Dave Duffet, it’s problems like these that are typically solved in team fashion. “The guys that were installing the windows, their boss, the architect, and us—we all got together ...in forty-five minutes to an hour we came up with a solution that’s going to work,” says Duffet. The storm window solution? A simple ridge vent with a shingle above lets the air in and out, enabling the windows to breathe to reduce the heat buildup. A porous venting material keeps insects out but allows the air to pass through.
“In a building like this, you’re constantly uncovering changes, better ways of doing things, things you didn’t anticipate,” says Marty Knauss, Lehigh Project Manager. “It’s pretty close to impossible for an architect or engineer to put down on paper exactly what needs to be done for a church that was built 130 years ago.”
At Asbury, an air handling system capable of both heating and cooling had to be installed without mounting it on the roof. The solution was to put the equipment in the north tower where louvers and openings are a source of fresh air. And because RBR wants the building to be as green as possible, thirty geothermal wells were dug on the south side of the church to a depth of 300 feet. A ground source heat pump will reject heat from the building in the summer and add heat in the winter. Since the temperature of the earth is a constant 54˚ F at that depth, heating requirements are greatly minimized.
“Utilizing the constant temperature in the ground allows you to accomplish both heating and cooling,” says Knauss. “You cool by rejecting the heat collected from the surface...For heating, the system will have boiler supplements, but it will provide heating by taking water that’s only 54 degrees and running it into a loop as opposed to keeping a big air handler which might be sucking in 10 degree air in the middle of winter. It’s a more energy-efficient system to run.”
By October the new Vermont slate roof was up. You could also see the dazzling new copper flashings on the trims and valleys and along the roof edge. The window frames were painted a deep antique green that complements the building’s weathered stone. (Ani DiFranco, who chose the color, has been very interested and involved in the design process, and the completed building will surely be a reflection of her creative inspiration.)
Creative financing lessens the city’s share
All of this exterior work was done because of the vision and commitment of Righteous Babe Records, with no financial assistance from the city or funds from M&T Bank, both of which had committed to the project at the time that RBR bought the building from the city. The original deal was that the city would restore the exterior and RBR the interior, each of which would cost about $2.5 million. That was in addition to the $200,000 that RBR had already spent on a year’s worth of architectural drawings and structural analysis.
“The logic was that the city gets to enjoy the exterior—the beautiful architecture—and we use the interior for our purposes—a win/win situation,” says Scot Fisher. “After 9/11 and the city’s continued downward financial spiral, we borrowed the money to start work on the exterior. Because if the roof is leaking, all is for naught. So although we’re doing the work on the exterior, the city is responsible for this work. What it means is that we’re in this together.”
It’s a sweetheart deal for City Hall. The city takes out a loan to pay for the exterior work but never has to put up any cash. The owners of the property, which was never on the tax rolls, will actually make tax payments into a special fund that will be used to pay off the city’s loan. After the loan is paid off in ten to fifteen years, the property goes on the tax rolls as a $5.5 million historic renovation that could last another century. Meanwhile, RBR is financing its portion of the renovation in part through a combination of New York Empire Zone tax reimbursements and a federal tax credit.
“In an Empire Zone, the State of New York reimburses what you pay in taxes for fifteen years as long as you create a certain number of jobs,” says Scot Fisher. “There have been examples of how Empire Zones have been abused, but this is an example of what the Empire Zone is supposed to do: a business downtown, and a project that wouldn’t have happened without it.”
The value of hipness
In his 2002 book, The Rise of the Creative Class, economist Richard Florida argues that the twenty-first century’s healthiest cities will not be those that compete for big companies (indoor fishing holes and casinos) or big pork (new convention centers and federal buildings), but those which attract and retain educated, creative young people. These people (whom Professor Florida of Carnegie Mellon University dubs the “creative class”) start new companies, revitalize downtowns, attract other investors, and build tax bases. Citing Seattle, Portland, and Austin as successful examples of such hip destinations, Florida writes, “If places like Buffalo, Grand Rapids, Memphis, and Louisville do not follow suit, they will be hard pressed to survive.”
Perhaps the principals of the Asbury renovation project are the leaders (or a microcosm) of Buffalo’s creative class. Perhaps this is the project that will push Buffalo out of rust belt oblivion and into the pantheon of hip American cities with a vibrant downtown teeming with artists, actors, poets, musicians, and free-spending tourists. After all, Buffalo has many of the advantages young artists seek: low rents, a vital creative community, great architecture, a thriving gay scene, some nice scenery, and lots of funky warehouse neighborhoods.
But is that what we really want to be? Just another hip destination like Portland or Austin? For those of us who love this city, Buffalo feels more akin to Galveston, Charleston, Baltimore, Brooklyn, or Savannah—old industrial American cities with great character, interesting neighborhoods, and a palpable sense of history and possibility. That may be one reason why DiFranco and many other successful people choose to stay in Buffalo, investing their time, talent, and money rescuing and rebuilding what’s already here.
Inside, the church is still a construction site, a vast, chilly, pewless space. Paint peels from the walls and the old light fixtures still hang above the long galleries running along both sides of the sanctuary. Folding tables hold stained glass removed from the great front window, now covered in a protective plastic frame. But the air handling equipment is being raised into the towers and the beauty of what’s already been achieved on the outside and the enthusiasm and energy of everyone working on the project portends that very soon—within a matter of months—the old church will once again be filled with music, celebration, and life.
Phil Nyhuis is a freelance writer and jazz trumpet player living in Buffalo.
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