MONTAGE: Salvaging a sacred space by expanding its use.

In more than one previous article, I have explored the challenges that urban or inner-city church congregations face.  Their aging buildings are costly to maintain; parking is inadequate in an area where land prices are usually high; the multiple floors and narrow hallways rarely accommodate disabled people; the higher rates of poverty nearby result in elevated crime, which costs more to insure and to install deterrent devices.  But the biggest hurdles are demographic.  More often than not, these churches are Catholic or Mainline Protestant (Lutheran, Episcopalian, Methodist, Presbyterian), a theological branch whose congregants have been steadily shrinking in number for over thirty years.  The resulting population attending these churches is smaller and often older, compounding the strain to budgets, because the members are more likely to depend upon fixed retirement incomes and to demand greater access for wheelchairs.

The church I featured as my archetype for this pervasive problem is First Lutheran in downtown Indianapolis.  When I first covered this church as part of a broader feature on shrinking old Protestant denominations, it was vacant—closed since 2006.  I sharpened my focus on the church a few months later by adding an interview with a former First Lutheran congregant into the whole analysis.  This congregant had come to terms with the fact that it would probably never be a church again; she would have been content watching it evolve into multi-family housing, if it meant salvaging the building.  And that was what the owner at the time had hoped to achieve: after First Lutheran closed, he stripped it of all its carpet and most of the religious accoutrements, then marketed it to developers for a condo conversion project.  But this was 2008, and the housing market in general—and the downtown condo market in particular—went completely bust.  First Lutheran was in limbo.

A recent visit reveals a much more promising future ahead.

Now called The Sanctuary on Penn, it is no longer a church, but it still conveys the historic use of this 140-year-old building well enough that a shrewd entrepreneur recognized its viability as a venue for hosting events.  Built in 1875 as Mt. Pisgah Lutheran Church, it is one of the oldest surviving structures in Indianapolis and is on the National Register of Historic Places.  And, for the past year, First Lutheran has hosted weddings, wedding receptions, banquets, sorority balls, live music/shows, charity fundraisers, corporate parties, and poetry slams.

The current owner bought the property in 2011, at a point when it was sitting in a semi-mothballed state.  It wasn’t in imminent danger of collapse; it wasn’t infested with vermin.  The previous owner had clearly taken just enough care of it with the hope that an entrepreneur would find a new use for it.  Here’s a view of the chancel, which now serves as a stage.

The elegant decay was a conscious decision.  One of the biggest goals of the new owner was to retain (or even enhance) the aged look while returning the old church to basic functionality. 

Prior to the transformation, most of the walls of the main sanctuary were covered with the weathered, discolored drywall visible on the left side of the photo above.  The restoration team stripped most of the drywall, leaving the plaster underneath, which obviously reveals its own fair share of weathering.  When the team achieved the desired patina, it applied a sealant to mitigate against further flaking of the paint and plaster.  At various points, a rudimentary stenciling is still visible on telltale portions of the old wall.

And here’s a view looking from the opposite end of the nave.  The faint stencils sit on the plaster to the right of the opening at the center of this photo.

The renovation of First Lutheran into The Sanctuary on Penn is thorough.  A smaller room once served as a separate chapel directly behind the chancel:

According to the owner, this chapel is the most acoustically perfect room in the building, so he recommends it as the live music space for shows that are particularly small (under 80 people).  Since this has historically been a Lutheran church, wine was a key element of communion.  So it should come as no surprise that it had fully dedicated space for a bar, along with a motorized retractable partition that required considerable refurbishment to make it usable again.  This bar rests along the wall where I stood to take the previous three photos.  Pivoting around and stepping back, I was able to capture the emergence of the bar as the partition came down:

Meanwhile, the loft above offers additional lounge space:

Venturing to the lower floor, the patina continues on the stairwell:

The owner could have easily delegated the expansive undercroft to storage, but instead he took advantage of the garden-level sun exposure and exposed brick by opening the majority of it to the public.  The largest room is another lounge to escape the din of a noisy reception party.

The owner strived to retain as much of the original church that the previous owner hadn’t already removed, so the bar on this level is actually the part of the chancel where parishioners would come to receive communion.

Since the overwhelming majority of clients have used the space to host weddings and the receptions, it was prudent to dedicate the smaller rooms to wedding parties.  The bride and her bridesmaids can claim two rooms in the front of the church:

While the groomsmen get the man cave in the back:

The restrooms also feature some whimsical touches.

The floor consists entirely of old pennies encased in a laminate.

And more medieval stenciling on the original plaster walls:

The exterior may not have consumed the majority of this $400,000 renovation, but it certainly involved the largest amount of new construction.  The exterior fell under greater scrutiny with Indiana Historic Landmarks as well, not only because of the status of First Lutheran Church as a freestanding structure, but because it sits on the southern edge of the St. Joseph Historic District.

Using the appropriate wrought iron and wood to meet IHL’s approval and respect the historic integrity of the building proved a challenge for the owner and his team.  Even the location of the dumpsters elicited dissent; they must sit on the property’s periphery.  But the result is a significant improvement over what had previously been an overgrown dumping ground.  The elevated deck offers respectable views:

And this arrangement raises the critical concern of how this ancient building is accessible persons with access and functional needs, since this consideration undoubtedly led to its obsolescence: the aging congregation at First Lutheran was increasingly wheelchair dependent, and this old church did not accommodate them easily.  The new owner completely refurbished an old ADA-compliant ramp through this back entrance.

The building has no elevators, so access to the undercroft (where the main restrooms are located) is impossible by wheelchair.  But the chancel has a ramp.

Which leads to a small restroom that the renovators added in order to accommodate wheelchairs.

And perhaps my favorite hat-tip to the age and history of this plot of land: at the Pennsylvania Street entrance, in a small anteroom, rests the cornerstone of the original church at this site.

First English Lutheran Church, established in 1854, didn’t survive very long, but the same congregation rebuilt at Mt. Pisgah just twenty years later, under the supervision of architect Peter P. Cookingham.  Stepping outside of this anteroom, the visitor faces the American Legion Mall: another National Historic Landmark and a fantastic site for taking those outdoor wedding photos.  Speaking of photographs, since my own obviously don’t entirely do justice to this shrewd adaptive re-use, I’ll let the website for The Sanctuary on Penn fill in the gaps, including a much better depiction of the space while it is in use and some showing the inclusion of the American Legion Mall for the wedding party.

Lest this article come across as nothing more than a promotion for The Sanctuary on Penn, it’s essential to step back a bit further and evaluate the implications of the owner’s decisions from a historic preservation standpoint.  While a renovation of the exterior would have faced inevitable obstacles from Indiana Historic Landmarks and other preservation advocates, most of the interior was fair game.  After all, the previous owner had largely gutted it.  And most adaptive re-uses require some changes to the interior configuration to allow for the building’s new function.

So what if the new owner had decided for a complete interior renovation, making the church look as if it had been built last year?  Obviously such an approach would have increased the costs exponentially, and it might have attracted a different clientele—those who may find the cracked plaster and exposed brick a bit off-putting.  But at the same time, it could have symbolically tethered the building to its ecclesiastical roots: by suppressing the intrigue elicited by its age, the only other conspicuous point of reference is its “churchiness”.  So, instead, he wisely chose to intensify its ancientness, diluting the allusions to religion: it is first and foremost an old building, and it was at one time a Lutheran church.  By doing this, he opened The Sanctuary up to a much broader audience: it’s not just going to attract Lutherans, or the church-minded (though it certainly won’t repel them either).  Much of this strategy recalls the point made at the beginning of this essay: the majority of Americans no longer attend church in century-old buildings.  While the shrinking Mainlines are more likely to conduct services in an edifice from the 19^th century, they too have largely migrated to newer buildings in the suburbs.  Meanwhile, the burgeoning non-denominational churches overwhelmingly meet in new structures, many of which are unadorned.  A conventional old church building like First Lutheran is almost a novelty.  It’s simply a classy relic that now serves as a multi-purpose venue, without the restrictions for hosting exclusively Lutheran weddings that might have stymied it back when it was a church.

The “dechurchification” of this building has clearly expanded its breadth of potential uses.  The smart adaptation warrants one last comparison to a well-regarded Indianapolis venue, the Earth House, which closed operations last summer at Lockerbie Central United Methodist Church.  The Earth House was first and foremost a community non-profit, but hosting live music shows proved quite lucrative and became a primary source of revenue.  However, the fundamental bylaws of the United Methodist denomination forbade the consumption of alcohol within the church buildings, which ultimately could have deterred some musicians from performing there (though it did allow the Earth House to host all-ages shows).  Near the end of the organization’s life, it managed to secure an exemption to the alcohol restriction from the UMC conference, though it still closed within a few months.  Now, the Sanctuary on Penn has begun to fill the void left by the Earth House, but without any restrictions on alcohol.

The minds behind The Sanctuary wisely blended what they knew about historic preservation with just the right interior changes to maximize the building’s fungible character.  First Lutheran still evokes a church, but a quick visit inside shows how well it downplays this history, while still retaining many of the old surviving church references.  The renovation found the perfect compromise, and in a niche market as competitive as event hosting, these aesthetic negotiations should significantly improve its chances of long-term viability—as well as the survival of one of the city’s oldest buildings.

Peeling back the turf to expose the polders.

In a country where settlement patterns are as heavily based on individual property rights as the United States, it is hard to define what constitutes a town or village, outside of the official political boundaries.  To a certain extent, the definition of an incorporated area as a “city”, “boro[ugh]”, “town”, “township”, or “village” is critical for a visitor’s understanding, because it is codified in to the various states’ constitutions.  However, these definitions vary greatly from state to state: the distinction between “town” and “village” only applies in a handful, while “town” has a completely different meaning in New York than it does in, say, Iowa.  Most states do not use boroughs; very few states south of the Mason-Dixon line use townships.

At the very least, statutes articulate cityhood and townhood to compensate for the persistently murky cultural definitions, which often demonstrate huge variety even within a single state.  Sure, we may see the corporate boundaries of a town on a map, but is that really where the town ends in the minds of the people?  Can a community claim an implicit ownership of an event that takes place a quarter mile outside of the limits, or must it annex that land in order to do so?  How do we account for cultural expressions in unincorporated towns, or what does it mean for a shared component of culture to straddle two or more corporate boundaries?  Conversely, a few states mandate the incorporation of all land within their boundaries; does that give these states an advantage for asserting local or community culture, or does it impose an added burden not expected in states in which very little land falls under incorporation?

I don’t expect a single blog article to be capable of providing answers to most of these questions, but at least I can offer an empirical example to enrich our understanding of how aggregated settlement can carry more than a passing whiff of cultural commonality when our senses are well engaged.  This example comes in the form of DeMotte, an unassuming little town in northwest Indiana, about 30 miles south of Gary.

It’s far enough away that Jasper County (which contains DeMotte) falls outside of the vast Chicago-Gary Combined Metropolitan Statistical Area, yet still close enough that it consumes the Chicagoland sub-culture.  The town depends mostly upon Chicago media; the town is within a reasonable commuting distance from the Calumet Region’s outer suburbs; Jasper County falls into the Central Time Zone along with a few other northwest Indiana counties whose economies are unquestionably tied to Chicago, whereas the vast majority of Indiana is under Eastern Time.  I wouldn’t be surprised if people in DeMotte typically cheer the Bulls and the Bears.

My guess is, however, that DeMotte is both too small and too far removed for most people in Chicagoland to be familiar with it.  No doubt the other residents of Jasper County know the name, but for almost everyone else, it is simply a sign along I-65 shared with the nearby town of Roselawn, both of which are accessible through Exit 230.  A drive along U.S. Highway 231 through the heart of DeMotte isn’t likely to avert the eyes too much: it’s a fairly typical Indiana town, certainly not impoverished looking but nor is it booming.  The block-long main street features a string of architecturally unremarkable low-slung buildings typical of a town of under 4,000 people:

It’s not the physical form of DeMotte that stands out in any way—it’s the less conspicuous details.  Under closer scrutiny, a few anomalies emerge.  In this case, I first noticed this unusual last name:

Eenigenburg.  Not a name you see too much anywhere, let alone in Indiana.  In most Midwestern states, it’s usually reasonable to guess that a long, unusual sounding name is of German or Scandinavian descent.  But I know German well enough to recognize that a double vowel pairing, particularly two of the same vowel, is uncommon; however, another language commonly mistaken for German by the unacquainted uses this pairing (presumably a diphthong) routinely: Dutch.  Thus, my first guess was that Eenigenburg was of Dutch lineage, and a quick Wikipedia search reveals that, at the very least, it’s a town in the Dutch province of North Holland.  More telling, though, are the top results after a Google search using this last name, most of which claim an address in Northwest Indiana or Chicago’s southern suburbs: Eenigenburg Builders, Eenigenburg Roofing, Eenigenburg Quality Water, Eenigenburg Xteriors, Eenigenburg, Mfg., Inc—all located in towns like Dyer, St. John, Lansing (Illinois), or DeMotte.

But Eenigenburg is hardly the only unusual last name to show up on signs in town.

In this case, the “-stra” suffix is the giveaway.  It derives from the old Germanic –sater, meaning dweller or sitter.   A more common last name that uses this suffix is Dykstra (sometimes spelled “Dijkstra”), meaning “dweller of the dyke”--obviously Dutch, once again.  And this surname suffix pops up routinely in DeMotte.

(This final photo is unfortunately very blurry, but the white lettering with red background at the bottom of the sign says “Walstra Landscaping”.)

By this point, I was getting a feel for the town, and having seen enough of the Dutch language in thepast, I could intuit which of these last names reflected that shared heritage.  It was like an Easter egg hunt:

Most “van” last names are Dutch derived—a contrast from the German “von”.  (And before anyone protests that “Ludwig van Beethoven” was German, it does not take much research to learn that his grandfather came from Dutch-speaking Flanders.)

The “Dreyer” sounds German, but the “Ooms” and “Van Drunen”?  Unmistakably Dutch.

Another blurry one, and “Hollandale” on the left-hand sign might be a stretch (then again, it could be a Dutch immigrant to another country in Europe).  And the “Drees” on the right-hand sign is ambiguous: it could be North German, French, English, or Dutch, but most research indicates that the most common origin is Dutch, and given the milieu in which DeMotte rests, Dutch heritage would be the most reasonable guess.  Other words require little to no guesswork:

After awhile, it almost became too easy finding Dutch surnames in DeMotte.  But other indicators of this town’s distinctive Netherlandedness are often far subtler than a field of tulips or a windmill.

The American Reformed Church in DeMotte is part of the Reformed Church in America, a denomination that owes its roots to the 17^th century Dutch settlement of New Amsterdam, where it was the established church of the colony.  Despite its name, the RCA includes some Canadian churches within its membership.  The majority of RCA churches in Indiana are in the northwest of the state, within a 75-mile radius from Chicago.  By this point, the name of the pastor should come as no surprise:

Like the aforementioned “-stra” suffix, “-sma” is also common among Dutch surnames and means “son of” or “descendant of”, as evidenced by the more common last name “Boersma”, which loosely means “son of a farmer”.  The closest translation I have been able to get on the “jel-” prefix in “Jelsma” is “to go”, so perhaps it’s “descendant of the traveler”?  An appropriate name for a Dutch-American.  And the American Reformed Church isn’t the only denomination in DeMotte with Dutch origins:

The Christian Reformed Church (to which Bethel ostensibly belongs) also owes its evangelical, Calvinist heritage to the Dutch Reformed Churches of the Netherlands.  Though it split from the Reformed Church of America in the 1850s, it is now apparently about 50% larger than its derivative denomination, with about 300,000 members in USA and Canada.  Its highest concentrations are in the Midwest and Mid-Atlantic, while it’s particularly sparse in the South and New England.  Indiana has around twenty CRC member churches, and three of them are in DeMotte—more than any municipality in the state.   A quick look at the staff directory at Bethel reveals that three of the four last names are unmistakably Dutch.

At this point it is safe to say that DeMotte—or perhaps the greater DeMotte area—has an unusually high concentration of Americans with Dutch heritage.  The last names on all these signs are ample evidence.  And Census records confirm it: Dutch is the third most commonly reported country of origin (9.6%), behind German (27.6%) and Irish (16.5%).   (In the 2000 Census, it was the second most common ancestry.)  In none of the surrounding counties does Dutch ancestry appear in the top three ancestries; only in Newton to the west does it appear in the top five.  And although the Midwest and North Atlantic can claim a larger share of Dutch Americans than the rest of the country, not even Michigan, with the highest percentage of persons of Dutch heritage (5.1%) can claim it in the top five ancestries for the state.  Most of Michigan’s Dutch population has concentrated in the southwest, near Grand Rapids (evidenced in the map), while metro Chicago also has quite a few.  Thus, one could argue that a “Dutch belt” loosely runs from southwest Michigan along the lakeshore, into Indiana, and across to Chicago’s southern suburbs.  But rural ethnic boundaries are generally very difficult to define, due to the already low population densities.  It is hard, even, to determine if Jasper County can claim much Dutch heritage outside of DeMotte.   The closest way to determine quantitatively if DeMotte is a distinctly Dutch enclave, or if the population is scattered across the county, would be to engage in intensely detailed Census research down to the block group and block level.  However, it is not usually possible to obtain data from the Census on something as cryptic as Dutch ancestry at that level of geographic detail.

So I prefer good old-fashioned empiricism, which is how I came to the conclusion that DeMotte had lots of Dutch-Americans in the first place.  Clearly it was not too hard after noticing the first few unusual last names on signs.  I’ve managed to validate some of those observational hunches even further through the research used in creating this essay.  For example, the Town of Demotte’s website affirms the towns heritage through the events calendar, which lists and upcoming Touch of Dutch Festival, Parade, and Car/Bike Show.  Some of my speculations might be stretching credibility, but the indicators are numerous enough to suggest more than a bizarre coincidence.  Unfortunately, none of my online research has revealed anything that would explain DeMotte’s history as a Dutch settlement.  Why did they choose this patch of land, beyond the Dutch affinity for extreme flatness in topography?  How far did the Dutch ancestors settle outside of DeMotte town limits?  Can the entirety of Jasper County claim this Dutch prevalence, or is it mostly isolate to the area in and around this community?  To delve any further would most likely require another visit to DeMotte, but I’ll save an ethnography for someone more qualified.

I’m going to conclude with my favorite picture of all from the DeMotte area, in which my assertion might not make for a defensible case in a court of law, but it works adequately for this blog:

I couldn’t begin to guess what the use of this strange little building is, which stands in the front yard of an affluent home around the western border of the town.  But its most striking feature is that crow-stepped gable—a roof-line that descends in a series of right angles.  Also known as a stair-step gable or trapgevel in Dutch, they are, as I recently discovered from travels, most common in the Low Countries—noticeable in Netherlands but virtually ubiquitous and iconic in Brugge, the most prominent ancient city in Belgium.  And Brugge is in the Flanders region of Belgium, where, as mentioned earlier, the dominant language is Dutch.  Is the owner of this house displaying a hat-tip to his or her family’s history?  Like the unofficial boundaries of the Dutch heritage in Jasper County (there are no official boundaries), or greater Chicagoland for that matter, one can only gather evidence from plowing the land and the roads that divide it.