Sacred Commute

What Do You Think You're Looking At? #123

Last year, I featured here a building in Pequannock Township, New Jersey. It began life, I believe, as a Chinese buffet—which I went to once, and which was very good—before being converted into a Subaru dealer.

While I was looking at the Google Street View historic imagery, I noticed something interesting about the building next door. Here it is now, currently a medical office.

What the historic imagery revealed was very curious:

I’ve seen churches in repurposed buildings before, or in strip malls, but they usually lack the adornments of buildings purpose-built as churches. The windows have a vaguely churchlike look—they resembles the exteriors of some of the 1960s-era modernist Catholic churches.

So I thought it was possible that this structure had actually been built as a church, with its mix of commercial uses coming later. But I had my doubts, because it sure does look like an office building of some sort.

I couldn’t find anything online, but I went to Historic Aerials, which is really cool and useful for this kind of work. The building is from the 1960s; here it is in 1966. The elevated left-hand corner is where the steeple was added.

And here it is, more clearly, in 1987:

No steeple! In the older image, you can see trucks sticking out the back. In the Google Maps 3D view, you can see there are still truck bays in the back there (and the Subaru next door is the old buffet):

Notice that the building has not been expanded, shrunken, or otherwise significantly altered since it was built. I’m pretty sure that it began life as some kind of automotive or warehouse building, with or without attached offices.

It just happened that a church found the location and rent acceptable, and the exterior just happened to be credible enough that a steeple almost fooled me as to its origins. This was a church that was not created, but evolved.

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Related Reading:

Taking Preservation Into Their Own Hands

“Excuse Me, Where’s the Car Aisle?”

Olive and Other Oils

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