Moving St. Gerards

The Preservation Buffalo Niagara Board of Trustees approved this statement at its December 7, 2009 meeting. 

A congregation in Norcross, Georgia, near Atlanta, is proposing to deconstruct St. Gerard’s Roman Catholic Church, located on Bailey Avenue at the corner of East Delavan Avenue on the East side of the City of Buffalo, and relocate it to their community.  As preservationists, we can all agree that we would like to see the currently closed St. Gerard’s become revitalized and once again flourish at its current campus site, serving as an asset for the neighborhood.

Circumstances dictate that we must deal with the reality of the situation now before us.  Should we vigorously oppose this plan to relocate St. Gerard’s?   If we do succeed in preventing this move, what is the likely future of this magnificent structure?  
Photo by Chuck LaChiusa

In some ways, this proposal illustrates Buffalo’s dilemma:  It highlights the city’s architectural richness while also underscoring our economic distress and shrinking population.  Our city has 420 religious structures, many located on multi-building campuses.  These structures were built during times when religious duties were more strongly observed in a city whose population once approached 600,000. It is now 270,000 and still declining.  The reality is that Buffalo has more churches than it can use for worship space.

 Fortunately, Buffalo has found creative ways to deal with a few of its vacant and abandoned churches, including the creation of the King Urban Life Center Charter School, two Karpeles manuscript museums, Babeville performance and exhibition space, the Upper West Arts Center and the recently inaugurated Buffalo Religious Arts Center.

 While we can point to these successes, finding an adaptive re-use for a large church structure is a daunting task that typically requires a Herculean effort and significant resources.  No such effort is underway for St. Gerard’s.  If we work to stop this move, we are likely to see accelerating damage; the roof is already failing and if the building is unheated this winter the plaster will  may lose it’s integrity and structural damage could soon follow, along with damage to irreplaceable building components.  Buffalo will also be adding to it’s its growing inventory of vacant, deteriorating churches such as St. Matthew’s on East Ferry Streets just a few blocks from St. Gerard’s. 

Will the moving of St. Gerard’s put other Buffalo churches up for grabs by more affluent communities in other areas from other parts of the country?  Given that, in recent history at least, we do not know of any large church anywhere else in the country that has been deconstructed and moved such a long distance, we feel that the moving of St. Gerard’s is a very unique situation that will not be precedent setting.  St. Gerard’s very closely matches the design of a new church building that the Georgia congregation had commissioned, a classically designed structure that, to build new, would be inordinately expensive to construct given current construction costs.  

Losing St. Gerard’s, either through a move to Georgia or through deterioration and eventual demolition, will be a loss of a piece of Buffalo’s heritage which will be felt most keenly by its eastside neighbors and St. Gerard’s former parishioners.  

Before the Diocese of Buffalo gives its final blessing for the deconstruction, we recommend that they get assurances that everything, including finances, are in place for the church’s reconstruction.  We also feel that the Diocese should work with neighbors and tenants of the remaining buildings on the St. Gerard’s campus to develop and implement a plan for the church’s land, placing it in other uses so it will not be a vacant patch on a major corner.

We also recommend that the Norcross parish find an appropriate place in St. Gerard’s to interpret its architectural and cultural history and we trust that the congregation will always welcome St. Gerard’s Buffalo parishioners whenever they manage to visit ‘their’ church.  

The reality of this situation is that we see no likelihood of revitalizing St. Gerard’s in-place.  Therefore, rather than focusing opposition on a unique situation involving one church, Preservation Buffalo Niagara feels that our energies will be better spent focusing on efforts to deal with the larger problem of vacant and soon- to -be vacant religious structures in Buffalo and surrounding areas.  

We will seek funds to inventory and assess our vacant churches and to develop increased expertise and tools to enable us to work effectively with church officials and neighborhood associations.  We need to work in a positive, practical manner with these stakeholders, including the areas largest owner of religious buildings, the Diocese of Buffalo, to pursue ways to save these important historic resources.  A key need is to identify and plan in advance for upcoming church closings.  Otherwise, in just a few years, great damage can be caused to a vacant, unheated structure in the Western New York climate, magnifying rehabilitation costs, sometimes beyond the economic feasibility to make repairs. 

St. Gerard’s illustrates the huge problem that Buffalo faces with our large stock of historic, monumental religious structures. As preservationists, let's start now to learn how to deal effectively with this issue.