Giving Helping Hands to Places of Worship

Snaps:Daniella Zalcman for The Wall Street Journal

By KATHLEEN LUCADAMO
Wall Street Journal
3/5/2012

The Serbian Orthodox Cathedral of St. Sava, a storied church nestled among offices and bustling shops on West 25th Street was in need of divine intervention in 1990. The roof of the 19th-century Gothic Revival landmark was near collapse. Restoration costs alarmed the congregation. Finding specialists able to tackle the intricate project was daunting.

The water damage was threatening an edifice with a solid place in the city’s architectural history. Built as an “uptown” Episcopal chapel for Trinity Church on lower Broadway, the building on 25th Street was designed in 1850 by acclaimed Trinity architect Richard Upjohn. The chapel thrived for decades but many of its members eventually began moving still farther north and the church building was sold to the Serbian Orthodox community during World War II.

By 1990, the physical condition of the church had severely deteriorated. “We needed to make the building safe,” said the Rev. Djokan Majstorovic, who has been pastor of St. Sava’s for 13 years.

The answer to St. Sava’s prayers was Sacred Sites, an arm of the New York Landmarks Conservancy dedicated to restoring religious institutions throughout the state. The nonprofit gave St. Sava a seed grant of $6,500 to hire a building conservator who drafted a master restoration plan.

Since then, the program has provided four grants and helped the church to raise $3.5 million—mostly from members of its congregation—to restore shingles on the slate roof, replace gutters and refurbish the aging facade of the building bordering the Flatiron and NoMad districts.

The Landmarks Conservancy started Sacred Sites in 1986 to help provide money and technical assistance in restoring religious buildings, armed with a $100,000 grant from the J.M. Kaplan Fund.

“It became apparent to us by all the requests for help that these churches were crumbling away,” said Joan K. Davidson, who was president of the Kaplan Fund at the time. “It’s a constant battle to save these places and sometimes you have to save them from being demolished or death by decay.”

Sacred Sites has provided $7.5 million to 680 religious organizations across New York, including 200 city landmarks. Projects included the renovation of stained-glass windows at the Free Synagogue of Flushing in Queens, replacement of the roof and Tiffany windows at Brown Memorial Baptist Church in Clinton Hill, Brooklyn, and refurbishing the bell tower of St. Ann’s Episcopal Church in the South Bronx.

The grants cover between 10% and 30% of total restoration costs. That funding also provides leverage for institutions to get loans and other grants and aids in capital fundraising, according to Sacred Sites director Ann-Isabel Friedman. Money from the program routinely goes for roof and other structural repairs, the most pressing problem for most institutions and one they must tackle before cosmetic changes begin.

Religious leaders say the moral support is often more critical than the cash.

“It’s like a big sister or brother putting their hands on your shoulder and saying, ‘Relax. We’ve seen this before. This can get done,'” said the Rev. Christopher Miller, pastor of Brown Memorial.

To showcase the work of Sacred Sites, an estimated 140 congregations that have benefited from funding, including 40 in the city, will host open houses May 19-20 so neighbors can see the restorations.

The outreach comes at a crucial time. The recession has made getting funding more competitive for religious groups, and in 2011, New York state didn’t award any restoration grants to religious institutions for the first time in 24 years, Ms. Friedman said.

Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s office said the grant application process changed last year and the recipients were selected based on the economic priorities of the community.

“The regional economic development councils were created to streamline state funds, thereby empowering communities to prioritize how they use state support and rebuild their local economies from the ground up,” said Matthew Wing, a spokesman for the governor.

Demonstrating that repairs to a house of worship will spur economic growth in such categories as creating long-term jobs is a challenge, preservation experts concede. But they argue that religious buildings provide needed services such as day care and food pantries at a time at a time when funding for such programs are scarce.

“Religious institutions are the centers of communities. They provide important social services and become a bastion of justice and help,” said Ms. Davidson.

Some religious buildings didn’t get enough help in time because of poor maintenance.

In 2006, the First Roumanian-American Congregation, a 150-year-old sanctuary on the Lower East Side’s Rivington Street that was famous for its musical acoustics, was reduced to rubble after the roof collapsed. The small synagogue previously had declined restoration grants, including $10,000 from Sacred Sites, because it couldn’t secure matching funds for proper maintenance, according to Ms. Friedman.

But even so, she said, “If our program wasn’t here, we might have had more Rivington Streets.”

A version of this article appeared May 2, 2012, on page A20 in some U.S. editions of The Wall Street Journal, with the headline: Giving Helping Hands To Places of Worship.

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