Maybe it was this pulpit, worn smooth by grasping hands over a century of Sundays, that the Rev. Ralph Abernathy held as his voice boomed across the sanctuary. Maybe it was this mauve carpet, cardboard-thin now, that Coretta King stepped on as she ascended to the altar.
Since the first worshipers filled its pews 101 years ago, the former Presbyterian church at East 23rd Avenue and Ogden Street has withstood plenty, as transition and turmoil on the streets outside came through the door.
Now the church sits empty, a for-sale sign outside, and teeters on an uncertain future. Smack between one old church reborn as hip condos and one whose congregation is barely hanging on, the church is a bellwether for a neighborhood pulling itself back to respectability after a home-wrecking affair with crime and crack. And maybe being just a bit too successful.
“I’m concerned somebody’s going to tear it down,” said Paul Benington, president of the San Rafael neighborhood association.
Somebody could.
Although San Rafael is on the National Register of Historic Places, neighborhood buildings have no protection from demolition.
During the mad dash to city hall for historic-district designations in the 1980s, San Rafael was a bit too rough around the edges to join in.
Until recently, there was no real need to protect the neighborhood’s history. Developers steered clear of San Rafael.
As a result, “it’s retained its historic character to a large extent,” Benington said.
But lately, developers have come sniffing around. A five-story apartment complex is planned just outside neighborhood boundaries, on Park Avenue. The departure of Children’s Hospital leaves a void builders are eager to fill.
The neighborhood is now seeking a city Overlay District designation, to create guidelines for new construction.
The overlay “doesn’t protect buildings from being knocked down,” Benington said. “It protects the neighbors from what might come in to replace those buildings.”
The city planning board will probably review that request in November.
“Street-car suburbs”
Bordered by Downing and Washington streets, East 20th and East 26th avenues, San Rafael was one of Denver’s first “street-car suburbs,” said historian Tom Noel.
Named by a homesick developer after a California city, it was built at a time when people walked to neighborhood churches, and San Rafael was full of them – six within its 20 blocks. One, Zion Baptist Church, houses the oldest African-American congregation west of the Mississippi.
The neighborhood is also home to the Orlando Flats apartments on Washington Street, one of the nation’s last remaining examples of 19th century planned affordable housing.
The elegant Italianate and Queen Anne homes of early Denver political leaders and doctors stand next to the homes of blacksmiths and laborers.
The neighborhood’s first church was 13th Avenue Presbyterian, consecrated in 1883 when 23rd Avenue was called 13th, Noel said.
Six years later came California Street Methodist Episcopal Church, at 22nd and Ogden.
In an invitation to its dedication, a Methodist bishop wrote that the church was “fitly built to be an attraction for generations to come.”
Soon afterward, First Presbyterian Church moved, piece by piece, from downtown to the north end of that same block of Ogden – and then burned. By 1906, the Presbyterians had rebuilt, creating the blond-brick landmark, with its cavernous sanctuary and meticulous stained glass windows, that is now for sale.
In between, the church’s story has been the story of its neighborhood.
By 1947, the Presbyterians had gone and their former church became New Hope Baptist Church. In the 1950s and ’60s, New Hope was a neighborhood center for civil rights and social justice.
In those days, San Rafael was a working-class neighborhood full of kids, said Tony Taylor.
Tony and his brother Al live with their mother, Evelyn, 95, in the Emerson Street house they grew up in.
Families took care of each other then, Tony said. If your mom was gone, someone else’s filled in.
At 22nd and Ogden, the “fitly built” church had become Scott Methodist, in honor of a well-known black preacher.
Andre Blackman was a kid in the ’60s when his family went there. But he remembers music that shook the rafters.
“That place used to rock,” Blackman said.
“Then in the ’80s, crack came,” Al Taylor said.”Gangs came along saying this is their ‘hood.”‘
By then, far different sacraments were observed next door, at the “Bucket of Blood” bar, and working families were starting to leave.
In 1969, the Scott congregation decamped and Scott Methodist became Handy Men Labor Co., with itinerant men sprawling on the grass hoping for a job.
New Hope left in 1993, when the congregation built a church on Colorado Boulevard.
“We marched from the old church to the new, the whole of us, some walked, some in cars,” said member Rudolph Ealy. Ealy said he was 103, then reconsidered. “I guess I’m only 93,” he said.
In areas like San Rafael, churches are more than spiritual havens, said Erika Warzel of Historic Denver. “They are important community anchors.”
And they are leaving.
“A lot of congregations are relocating to deal with land issues and structural issues. The historic buildings can become costly and difficult to maintain,” said Phill Martin of the National Association of Church Business Administration .
Ealy’s memory for details is fading. But he does remember one thing: new New Hope has air conditioning. The old did not.
The building’s last tenant, the Rev. Acen Phillips, who faces felony theft charges, addressed the shortcoming by knocking out chunks of the stained glass windows and shoving in air-conditioners, said Realtor Lynn Bartelt.
Turning corners
When Norman Cable and Jim Wiseman bought Scott Methodist church in the late 1980s for $335,000 and drew up plans for the Sanctuary Lofts, preservationists were ecstatic.
Bankers were less enthusiastic.
The developers had to pledge to buy units themselves if nobody else did.
While contractors measured and sawed, police cut holes in the plywood covering the stained glass windows and watched the goings-on across the street.
Three homes there were headquarters of a crack-marketing empire run by Edith Cobb, who also had a day job as a 911 dispatcher for Denver police.
“I called 911 once and she answered,” said Nancy Wiseman, who lived across the alley.
Wiseman described a scuffle, screaming – and gave the address.
“She said, ‘Oh, honey, that’s my place,”‘ Wiseman said. No police officers showed.
Cobb went to prison in 1994, and neighbors, including Cable and Wiseman, grabbed, gutted and rehabbed the houses.
The resurrection of Scott Methodist from the ignominy of day-laborer center helped San Rafael turn a corner.
With many corners left to turn, residents watch with interest as the former New Hope church’s next chapter unfolds.
Some, like Benington, worry that San Rafael’s recent renaissance and rising property values – condos in the Sanctuary Lofts sell for about what Cable and Wiseman paid for the whole building – might unravel the historic community.
In the meantime, Andre Blackman said he’s not sure what his elders would think of urban hipsters sipping lattes in the old bell tower.
“They’d probably flip. They’re old school.”
Karen Augé: 303-954-1733 or kauge@denverpost.com
