Over the past few decades, vacant and under-utilized churches have become a familiar sight in American cities.
In some cases, a congregation or a religious governing body – say, a Catholic diocese – will sell the church to developers, who then turn them into apartments, offices, art galleries, museums, breweries or performance spaces. But what about churches in neighborhoods that aren’t doing well, areas that are less attractive to developers looking to turn a profit?
In Buffalo, New York, two empty Roman Catholic churches have been converted – not into apartments or offices, but into other places of worship. One became an Islamic mosque, the other a Buddhist temple.
As an architect and historic preservation planner, I was drawn to this phenomenon. With the help of Enjoli Hall, who was then a graduate student at University at Buffalo, I interviewed those involved in converting the former churches.
With immigrant and refugee populations growing in post-industrial cities across the U.S., the con-version of vacant Christian churches into new places of worship can preserve historic archi-tecture and strengthen burgeoning communities.
In Buffalo, a split between east and west.
Buffalo has long been an immigrant gate-way. From 1850 to 1900, the city’s population in-creased by over 700%. In 1892, over one-third of Buffalo’s residents were foreign born. Poles, Ger-mans and Italians settled in the city, leading to a wave of church construction. In the 1930s, African Americans started migrating from southern US to the east side of the city.
But by 2010, the city’s population had dwindled to just over 260,000 people – less than half of what it was in 1950.
Nonetheless, Buffalo has recently been in the news for its efforts to overcome decades of population decline and disinvestment. In 2016, Yahoo News anchor Katie Couric, fascinated by Buffalo’s transformation, featured the city in her six-video series, “Cities Rising: Rebuilding America,” while The New York Times detailed the changes taking place in some of the city’s neighbourhoods. This public attention, however, has mainly focused on the West Side neighbour-hoods, which have experienced the bulk of investment and population growth. Neighbourhoods in Buffalo’s East Side continue to face tremendous challenges of poverty, crumbling infrastructure and abandoned houses.