When Buildings Change

I worked for a while in a big building in Belmont, California where many different kinds of people have worked over the past decades. 

Belle Monte Country ClubBuilt in the 20’s as the Belle Monte Country Club, some of the first people to get a paycheck there were big band musicians and lifeguards.  But it did not survive the Depression, when people stopped paying their membership dues and there were no more dances and pool parties. 

The building stood empty until World War II, when the next workers in the building were dogs and dog trainers; it became one of four centers where the Army started the K-9 Corps of dogs trained to guard military installations, sniff bombs, find dead bodies. 

After the war the Kaiser family, starting its healthcare empire, bought the big building and turned it into a cancer research lab; among the employees were thousands of (unpaid) mice. 

Finally the building settled into its current life.  Its workers today include chocolate makers, UPS drivers and nursery school teachers.  Oh, and folks like me, ministers.

Yes, the building is now a church. 

Buildings change.  A lot of buildings (not all) have character, I think, and some actually are characters.  And even might have souls.   So I am wondering: just as our body’s cells completely change every seven years, does a building’s character or soul change when its purpose changes, when different workers show up, or a locker room becomes a Sunday school room?  What changes and what remains the same? 

A clergy colleague Fran Geddes claims that the appeal of old church buildings, even to the unbeliever, is that they have a “residue of the spirit” that can move almost anyone. 

What residue remains, when a building changes?

In Hillary Mantel’s wonderful memoir, “Giving Up the Ghost,” she anchors her tale on different places she has lived.  On the last pages she writes, “The place we live in now is an apartment in a converted insane asylum.  It was built in the 1860’s, one of a loop of great institutions flung around London to catch and contain its burgeoning mad population, the melancholic and the syphilitic, the damaged and the deluded, the people who had forgotten their manners and the people who had forgotten their names.”  

What a great image, living in a converted insane asylum.  Mantel had a rough childhood and some very challenging adult health crises; people seemed crazy and made her feel crazy.   Relatives and doctors forgot their manners and forgot her name.  I got a sense that there was an ironic appropriateness in her choosing this place to live.  It might have been that there was a comforting residue from those workers who actually tried to help the suffering.  Or maybe the comfort is that those days are past.  Mentally ill out, lovely apartments in.  The building’s change symbolizes and embodies her change.

My tale of the country club becoming a church is pretty unusual. The reverse is more common, for a building built as a church to be converted into something very different, given the number of churches that fold every day. There’s a great museum of science and technology in Paris, the Musee des Arts et Metiers, housed in an ancient Benedictine abbey church. In the former apse now swings, day and night, Foucault’s pendulum.  Where once was celebrated the mystery of God moving over the deep now is demonstrated the mystery of the ever-rotating earth.

Such a contrast, the medieval monastery and the modern science museum.  But still there lingers in the place a residue of awe and mystery which I think would be missing in a new modern museum building.  (Umberto Eco builds on this contrast in his novel Foucault’s Pendulum, with scenes in this building.) 

Congregationall Church of Belmont, United Church of ChristWhat about when the opposite happens, like the building I’m talking about, the Congregational Church of Belmont, United Church of Christ.  What residue of the spirit lingers from its years as a country club, then dog training center, and cancer research lab?  And even now, like lots of churches, the building is not just a place for worship, but also a place for a nursery school, for off-site training meetings for businesses (hence the UPS drivers) and for fundraising parties – they host a mean Chocolate Fest each fall. 

The church members love telling stories about the building’s past, especially the country club part.  At their 50^th anniversary celebration Rev. John Brooke recalled a time he led a baptism in the sanctuary, which had been the club’s dining room.  The grandfather of the newborn told him afterwards that the baptistery was in the exact spot where he had stood as a young man 40 years earlier and played trombone in a big band.  The residue was of joyful noises, the sounds of Jimmy Dorsey became the gurgle of new babies.

But John also said that they always kept in mind the contrast between the country club’s exclusivity and their goal to be an inclusive church with no membership fees or class  rules.  When the church converted the dining room into the sanctuary they intentionally left on the walls all the lighting scones, which were adorned with crossed golf clubs, as a reminder of its past and also as a caution against the idols of the rich.  Sort of like leaving the golden calf around as a reminder; the residue had more of a bad smell.  Let’s not go back there.

I wanted to learn more about how the building has helped the war effort, and promoted healing.  That is, more stories about the dogs and the mice.  But the old church guys who had done the renovations mostly recalled bad plumbing and mouse poop.  Sometimes when we repurpose a building we only remember the hassles, or we want to forget it, and (literally) not smell the past residue.

Many churches are being forced economically to be multi-use, to rent out space to businesses for off-site training and nursery schools.  I think because the Belmont church has so many different uses in its past it’s been easier to be multi-use.  Some church have such strict ideas of “proper use” and proper residue that they shrivel up and die.

But in Belmont’s case, I think their building’s past continues to shape them. That the building had a role in fighting the evil of fascism and was a place devoted to finding cures for cancer - surely that past lingers in its present, as a place promoting peace and healing. 

Learn the history of the buildings you hang out in, and see if you can smell that past.

Copyright © 2015 Deborah Streeter