A TEAR-DOWN TRADITION

Old church building replaced historic Zang home

A developer is proposing to tear down a 64-year-old church building at Zang and Sixth to build apartments.

It’s not the first old building to be torn down on that site, nor the first apartments there.

Trinity Presbyterian Church bought the home of J.F. Zang in December 1943 with plans to tear it down and build a new church.

Zang built the home in 1906 on the highest point in his Crystal Hill addition. It was a two-and-a-half story white colonial with a view of Downtown. At the time the church bought it, the home had been used as an apartment building for 25 years.

Trinity Presbyterian began as a Sunday school in the 1880s, and it formally organized in 1890 under the Rev. Daniel G. Molloy, who had come from Arkansas in 1850. Molloy’s first services in Dallas were preached from a log cabin courthouse in Downtown. After that was torn down, Molloy held church in a saloon. Molloy started several churches in Dallas before organizing in Oak Cliff with 27 members in the home of J.E. Rogers, who would become superintendant of the Oak Cliff school district in 1910.

According to a Texas historical marker near Zang and Sixth, “Charter members in- cluded many pioneer Dallas families.”

In 1894, the church took a building at Jefferson and Beckley. That same year, the church bought land at 10th and Cumberland, where they first built a parsonage and then, in 1916, a church building.

The church fell into debt and lost its 10th Street building during the Depression. The Rev. Jasper Manton, a World War I veteran, took a pay cut to move to Dallas from Sherman and helm the church during this time.

The congregation met at Greiner Middle School for several years before buying the Zang house.

The congregation then held church inside the Zang house for seven years before its new building was constructed. A newspaper headline from 1944 announces that the new church would have one step.

“I have found during my ministry so many people unable to climb the flights of stairs to most church buildings that it is our purpose to erect a building just one step above the ground,” the newspaper quoted Manton.

Done in the Spanish modern style, the design of this church was a break from the tradition of grand staircases and pillars that most big churches featured at the time. It cost $100,000 to build and opened in 1950.

In 1957, Trinity Presbyterian had the second-largest congregation in Dallas.

But changing demographics caused membership to dwindle, and by the 2000s, most of the church’s members were seniors.

The church was known for its generosity, offering a food pantry, after-school tutoring and transitional housing for the homeless.

From a 2008 Dallas Morning News story about the church’s closing:

“Trinity has reached out to Hispanics hosting a small Spanish-language congregation called Iglesia Presbiteriana Emmanuel, as well as English language classes — efforts at dual-language worship flopped.”

In the end, expenses outweighed weekly offerings, and members voted to close it.

Developer Randy Primrose is buying the property with a plan to build two three-story apartment buildings with about 70 units. One building would face Zang, and the other would face Elsbeth. The two buildings would connect by a driveway with parking and a pool.

The church, which is owned by Grace Presbytery, has asbestos. The owners plan to save some of the stained-glass windows, but none of it would be reused in the new apartment project.

The old church is within the Oak Cliff Gateway, a 900-acre area that is being rezoned. Primrose is asking that the new zoning match the needs of the apartment project. In the most current Gateway plan, the Zang building can be built, but the Elsbeth building would be infeasible because multifamily housing would not be allowed on that street, Primrose says.

Back in the 1940s, the Zang house was demolished unceremoniously, and no zoning existed at the time.

So some things do change. —Rachel Stone