While Gothic arches, reaching upward, symbolize aspiration to heaven, here we see them reach towards a substituted objective, one that is more immediate: luxury condos, burgeoning above what was once Holy Trinity Church on Shawmut Avenue in Boston’s South End. A wish has been answered, but it is not the wish of those who prayed here. This photo, captured at night, shows the construction site aglow.
Known as the “German Church,” Holy Trinity served the needs of German immigrants in Boston in the early 19th century. Over the years it continued to hold German-English liturgies, as well as the city’s only approved Latin mass starting in 1990. As its congregation declined, some of the church grounds were dedicated to charities, including a shelter for older homeless people and another for at-risk youth. The parish was suppressed in 2008 with Cardinal O’Malley reassigning the building for “profane but not sordid use,” and now the structure is metamorphosing into The Lucas, a high-end development with 33 luxury residences ranging in price from $550,000 to upwards of $3,000,000.
When I see Holy Trinity, I see a place where generations of people have looked for spiritual, social, and in some cases material refuge. I do know that the Catholic church in Boston and worldwide has been ridden with scandal. And although I never attended services at Holy Trinity, I assume I would have differed with some of the preachings that were uttered within its stone walls. But this does not change what those gothic arches represent, a yearning that is universal.
What should have been done with the declining church? For the moment, let’s accept the platitudes that times change, buildings fall into disrepair, renovations are expensive, resources are scarce, parishes must be reconfigured, and economics does not support the infinite preservation of any structure — no matter how sacred — that loses money, particularly if the structure resides on a plot that could be used to make money were it released from the burdens of sacredness and charity. For this discussion, let’s posit that to become a luxury condo development was the unavoidable fate of Holy Trinity and that no one could have done anything to make the outcome any different. The narrower question that arises is, what should have been done with the church facade? Should it have been preserved or demolished completely?
It should have been demolished completely.
I’m sure it was expensive and complicated to preserve Trinity’s facade and I’m sure the developers felt they were doing their best to respect Boston’s history, and the church’s memory, by retaining some of its architectural details, so that passers-by could be reminded of what was once there, as opposed to encountering a sterile space where the past had been physically erased and overwritten. If your own most precious place were to be turned into someone else’s luxury tower, perhaps you would want that tower to bear some exterior remnants of the place you had known, so that you would be reminded of old times as you stood outside, or so that some child of the future might at least have a cue to discovering the history of your erstwhile refuge?
But the conversion of a sacred space into luxury condos is a violent act. We cannot soften that violence by physically melding the old with the new, not when the old and the new are so intrinsically disjoint. In fact, we intensify this violence by attempting to conceal it behind the guise of architectural preservation. We make a mockery of the past, a mockery of the church, a mockery of architecture, a mockery of the gothic arch as a symbol of spiritual striving when we try to have it both ways. Tear the church down, get rid of the arches, build the condos, don’t pretend you’re doing something nice.
The church as a visual icon now comes with a question attached, because of all these misguided efforts at preservation. When I see a soaring arch, I have an involuntary thought: “When are the condos coming?” I’ve been conditioned to associate sacred architecture with high value real-estate deals because I keep seeing these conversions everywhere: a church is not a church.
In the 1990’s I used to live near the Limelight dance club (reputed to be profane and sordid) which had taken over the Episcopal Church of the Holy Communion on West 20th Street in New York. When I moved to Boston’s South End in the 2000’s, the condo-ized Clarendon Street Baptist Church was a visual refrain in my life as a pedestrian. While still living in the South End, I used to attend concerts by the Renaissance choir The Tallis Scholars at the Church of the Immaculate Conception on Harrison Avenue. At a pre-concert talk some years ago, the group’s director Peter Phillips told the audience that this particular church had ideal acoustics for Renaissance choral music and that it was one of his favorite places in the world to perform — and his group, preeminent in its field, tours widely. A few years later, a sale and redevelopment was announced. Soon Peter Phillips will be able to purchase a condo at the former Immaculate Conception if he wants but I doubt the acoustics will be the same with the subdivisions and all.
I am reminded of the recent controversy around the renaming of Calhoun College at Yale University: different circumstances that raise similar questions. Should Yale keep the name of an infamous proponent of slavery on one of its undergraduate residences? Yale’s dean, Peter Salovey, argued that to change the name would be to obscure the past and deprive the Yale community of a chance to face the uncomfortable aspects of its own history.
Salovey’s argument might not seem relevant to Holy Trinity but it can be applied in an oblique way, as a thought experiment. Where Salovey argued that we should keep the emblems of an uncomfortable past in view so we are forced to confront that past, perhaps we too should keep the emblems of an uncomfortable present in view so we are forced to confront that present. If we are, today, a society that turns churches into condos, perhaps developments like The Lucas are doing us the service of showing us who we are. By this line of reasoning, to completely demolish the Trinity facade would be to deprive Bostonians of the chance to grapple with a difficult present topic: the colonization of sacred spaces. If that colonization is indeed underway, better that it should be clearly evidenced in a Frankensteinian streetscape where “the new” is grafted into the still visible carcass of the “the old,” so that we’ll all have to face what’s happening? I am not persuaded.
Rudi Seitz 
If indeed “to become a luxury condo development was the unavoidable fate of Holy Trinity and that no one could have done anything to make the outcome any different”, is the question whether the world is a better place with a condo development that looks like a church on the outside or a condo development that looks like something else?
It’s not obvious to me how to weigh the beauty of a the church’s exterior for future passersby who don’t have any emotional history with the former place — a positive for the world that continues to include it — against the painful reminder of what isn’t any more for those who do.
Or am I missing your point? Perhaps really the point is that a world in which it’s unavoidable for churches to be turned into luxury condos is a world that’s missing something important?
Yes, the question I’m trying to focus on is whether it’s better to preserve the exterior of a church that is slated to become condos, or demolish it completely? It’s an uncomfortable question and the context that forces us to ask this question is itself uncomfortable. One could argue that such conversions should never be allowed to happen but that’s not what I’m considering here. Assuming a conversion is imminent, it would seem that preserving some remnant of the past is a good thing. But my point is that these efforts at preservation actually make a mockery of the thing they are trying to preserve. Trying to keep the architectural details of a sacred and charitable space while building luxury condos inside is WORSE than demolishing it and building the condos from scratch, not that either is great.
Thanks for the comment and the opportunity to (hopefully) clarify my gist in this post.
What I’m trying to ask is, how do you weigh the mockery you describe against the positive benefit of having a beautiful piece of the past around? Not as a way of remembering the past, but just because it’s more aesthetically pleasant than the alternative.
A maybe extreme example: consider a city like Rome, where there are all sorts of repurposed parts of buildings from many different time periods, your house might have a piece of wall left over from 500 years ago or more. For a tourist in Rome today, it seems like having all these relics of history around is distinctly a positive experience, and is what makes walking around Rome very different from, say, walking around Houston.
So what’s the right way to think about the very real pain of the mockery you’re describing, as it applies to you today, relative to the experience of the future tourist to Boston who’s maybe walking through a city filled with beautiful facades of beautiful historic buildings that Ancient Bostonians once used as part of their religious rituals, or maybe walking through a totally modern city with no relics of the past?
I don’t know what the answer is, maybe you’re right that the only moral thing to do is tear down the historic building once you’re using it for a purpose so far removed from its original one. But I do think that proposal leads down the slippery slope to every city becoming Houston.
The point about the Houston problem is well-taken. But I consider the idea of repurposing a church for luxury condos as different from repurposing, say, a gumball factory. A church is symbolic in the way a factory isn’t. One reason many people find churches beautiful is the symbolism embedded in the architecture, e.g. the way the Gothic arches represent a kind of aspiration we can recognize even if we don’t participate in the same faith tradition. You could say that by preserving the church’s facade while building condos inside, we’ve kept something beautiful in view. I would say it’s no longer beautiful. We’ve made it ugly. It can only still be considered beautiful if we agree to see it in a purely superficial way that ignores its symbolic value. With the gumball factory, it’s different I think. There may be some irony in a utilitarian space suddenly becoming a seat of luxury, but if the demand for gumballs is less than the demand for condos, why not? I’m happy to pass by the erstwhile gumball factory and be reminded of my neighborhood’s industrial past, but not so with a desecrated church.
I came across your post while researching the German Holy Trinity Church. I recently found out that one of my ancestors was married at this church shortly after his arrival to America in 1869. This particular branch of my family stayed in the area till present day. Imagine my dismay when I discovered that the church was converted to condominiums…
I was born and raised about a mile or two from this church just over the bridge in South Boston. My own church, St. Augustines, was likewise gutted out and retrofitted for condos as was St. Peter and Paul, also in Southie, where my grandfather was baptized and was given funeral rites.
As one no longer affiliated with the Catholic Church on a personal level (I am now agnostic) I can understand the reasons why these once sacred places are no longer sustainable and therefore should be sold – yet (yet!) it does grieve me to my very core to see these former churches being converted into everyday living spaces. I wholeheartedly agree with you that it would have been far more respectful to demolish the structures entirely and have the developers start from scratch. As a former catholic knowing that people are going about the rituals of their daily lives inside a space where my ancestor once made all his most personal sacraments is truly upsetting. Yes, they really are gorgeous old buildings, but more than that these spaces relat to the spiritual lives of those in the community.
Therein lies the root of the problem — many who buy these condos are not from the community and so HAVE no ties to these spaces. They think that by “saving” the physical architecture of these spaces they are doing something good for the community. They unfortunately have not stopped to consider the other side, the spiritual and deeply personal histories attached to these spaces that should be allowed to fade respectfully into history.
In any case, I hate to say I was not surprised to see another local church turned into condos… it will never NOT hit a nerve for me, yet this is a trend that seems to be here to stay.
And now, if you will excuse me, I have to find out where the archives were moved to before the church was gutted…
Thank you so much for your comment, Erin. I agree with all that you’ve said so eloquently here. I hope you have had good luck in finding the archives and researching your ancestors. All the best to you. Rudi