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ABSTRACT
US cities with shrinking populations have faced tremendous challenges in conserving their built heritage. Often, conservation work involves adaptively reusing existing buildings. Most reuse activity is fuelled by the developer and market-driven rehabilitation of historic properties through tax credits and other incentives. Places of worship like churches, however, are difficult to rehabilitate, and cities lose this urban heritage after years of vacancy and neglect, and eventual demolition. In many shrinking cities, particularly those now welcoming new immigrants and refugees, serendipitous conservation of vacant churches through faith-to-faith conversion can be an asset to local planners and preservationists in their fight to save urban heritage from demolition. This paper examines two former Roman Catholic Churches in the City of Buffalo: one converted into an Islamic mosque, and another into a Buddhist temple, to argue that faith-to-faith conversions can be a viable tool for other US cities experiencing similar threats to their urban heritage.
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No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.
Correction Statement
This article has been republished with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.
Notes
1. The Pew Research Center estimates that several Christian denominations (including Catholic) declined between 2007 and 2014 (Pew Research Center Citation2015, 3).
2. These planning communities were defined during the city’s comprehensive planning process in the early 2000s to organize ongoing research and engagement activities around the city’s 2006 comprehensive plan “Queen City in the 21st Century.”
3. It is estimated that capital investments in the city are now more than six times what they were at the end of the twentieth century. Between 2010 and 2013, more than 4.4 billion in real estate and economic development projects were completed in the city.
4. We define church-like properties as those that have a church/liturgical function but may be housed in former single-family residences or commercial/institutional establishments.
5. The Lafayette Lofts project was completed in 2014 within the Lafayette Avenue Presbyterian Church in the historic and in-demand Elmwood Village historic district. The historic church, built in 1894, was designed by Lansing & Beierl (Napora Citation1995). The National Register-listed site (listed in 2009) was losing its congregation for years and decided to undertake what was called an imaginative solution to their problem. The project cost about $7 million and converted part of the church into 21 residential units, event spaces, meeting rooms, and Pre-K classrooms (Preservation League of New York State Citation2015; Epstein Citation2017).
6. The cornerstone on the church was laid in 1927.
7. Several other Muslim congregations were already in existence in the area by 2007, catering to various sects and ethnicities within the Islamic faith.
8. Dr. Hatim Hamad, DDS, is an endodontist with a private practice in Buffalo, NY. Dr. Hamad, a former US Navy serviceman, hails from California and is also Clinical Assistant Professor at University at Buffalo’s School of Dental Medicine in the Department of Periodontics and Endodontics.
9. Bhiksu Thich Minh Tuyen returned to California in 2012 and was subsequently replaced by the current monk, Bhiksu Thich Minh Chanh.
10. Currently, all demolition applications are referred to the Buffalo Preservation Board for review. The Preservation Board reviews to see if the property is contiguous with any properties that are on the National Register of Historic Places as Historic Landmark properties or if the property is eligible for designation. There is a thirty-day waiting period from the date of the application before a permit can be issued, with the exception of emergency declarations (City of Buffalo Department of Permit and Inspection Services Citation2018).
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Ashima Krishna
Ashima Krishna, PhD, is assistant professor of historic preservation in the Department of Urban and Regional Planning at the University at Buffalo. She also co-directs UB's graduate programs in historic preservation. Her research interests include historic preservation planning, urban conservation, urban heritage management, and religious historic sites.
Enjoli Hall
Enjoli Hall is a PhD student in the Department of Urban Studies and Planning at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She was previously an associate planner at the University at Buffalo Regional Institute. Her research interests include racial inequality, local governance, and community development in shrinking cities.