Storing Up Faith
What Do You Think You're Looking At? #185
Last week, we were in Hyattsville/Bladensburg/Colmar Manor, a few close-together communities in Prince George’s County, Maryland, looking at erstwhile nightclubs. The “Bladensburg strip,” it turn out, was once infamous for its rowdy nightlife scene.
So this week, we’re doing a church. But it’s in the same area: this is a recently built Eritrean Orthodox congregation (part of the Oriental Orthodox, rather than the Eastern Orthodox, branch of Christianity). It’s in the Colmar Manor area, across the Anacostia River from Bladensburg:
Pretty grand, isn’t it?
Now the reason this church exists here is that the congregation sold its old building, in the Bloomingdale neighborhood of Washington, D.C. This picture of the demolition appears in the church’s Google reviews:
A little searching found that old address, which has its own then-and-now contrast. Before demolition, and today:
Of course, that church structure predates the arrival of any large numbers of Eritrean Orthodox Christians. A further address search reveals an application to the D.C. government for historic designation, which states that the church’s historic name was St. Paul’s Methodist Episcopal Church South (the Methodist Episcopal Church being a denomination which hasn’t even existed since 1939!) Other names were Tabor Presbyterian Church and Greater Little Ark Baptist Church. The application also identifies the Eritrean Orthodox Church as the current owner.
There are a bunch of photos, a newspaper clipping, and a full history of the building in there. It’s a fascinating read if small-time history is your thing. Sadly, the application was made in November 2017, less than a year before the structure was demolished—probably an attempt to preserve it. It opened in 1905.
Now, that’s all an aside. Back to the current building. Do you notice anything about it, if you look closely? Here it is again.
If it looks a little bit like the ornamental elements are sort of affixed to a totally different structure, that’s because they are. Here it is before the church started work:
Here it is undergoing exterior alterations, including the addition of a bunch of windows, which are actually stained glass!
That’s pretty cool. It’s an inexpensive way to acquire a new building, and the work was done very nicely. This is incrementalism, adaptation, doing the best you can with what’s available. It’s how culture is made, how places are made.
There’s a certain awkwardness to this process when it transpires in suburbia, with structures that were not intended to last forever and be tinkered with. For example, look at this building in Langley Park, one of the poorer communities in the Maryland D.C. suburbs and home to many working-class immigrants:
That building is a little worse for wear. But it and many others like it along these old strips are platforms for individual people to start to build wealth. Cheap space is opportunity.
You can never start at the top.
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Beautiful stained glass and chandelier. Those folks have the right idea about religion. It's not meant to be brutal or streamlined!
Strictly speaking, Ethiopian Christianity is more like the trunk than a branch!
I always love driving by the Coptic Church and the Armenian Orthodox Church in the neighborhood.