AIA CONTEXT Summer 2018 - Up Close

A. Robert Jaeger PHOTO: CHRIS KENDIG

THE FIGHT TO SAVE SACRED PLACES

BY JARED BREY

In the late 1970s, Bob Jaeger was pursuing an MBA at the University of Michigan when he found his attention beginning to wander. It started with a general interest in stained glass and Tiffany glass, and soon, he says, he was spending a lot of time hunting for old windows, and taking pictures of them. Gradually, he became captivated by the buildings themselves, and the people who occupied them.

“Already what was percolating was my real passion, which was not human resources, but architecture and religious architecture,” says Jaeger, the president and co-founder of Partners for Sacred Places, speaking with Context from his office in Center City.

Over nearly 30 years, Partners for Sacred Places has become a leading advocate for the preservation of churches, synagogues, and mosques.

In that time, the conversation has grown to encompass much more than stained glass and intricate masonry. Studies conducted by Partners for Sacred Places have positioned religious buildings as powerful civic assets, serving communities that are many times greater than their congregations and creating considerable “economic halo” effects in their neighborhoods. And at the same time, the group has served thousands of individual congregations, helping them rethink the assets their buildings provide, and connecting them with art and nonprofit groups for the mutual benefit of both.

10 SUMMER 2018 | context | AIA Philadelphia

Here, Jaeger talks about his three decades in the field. The interview has been edited for length and clarity.

How did you get involved in this work in the first place?

Three totally independent efforts to deal with sacred places began around the same period in 1985, in New Mexico, Philadelphia, and New York, unbeknownst to each other. Something was in the water, or something was in the air, and pretty soon we started to find each other and talk to each other. We began to realize that there were some common threats and some common opportunities, and maybe there should be a national entity. So by ‘88, we hosted the first national conference on this issue, called Sacred Trusts.

New York was kind of a hotbed of controversy at the time. Church folks and preservationists were often at odds over the fate of important buildings. So New York seemed like a less hospitable place to start a national group, and Philadelphia seemed a little quieter and less divisive.

So we started Partners here in 1989.

Now, your advocacy includes arguments about civic benefits and economic spillover effects. But at the beginning, was your immediate goal just to preserve beautiful architecture?

Some of us came out of preservation, so I think the original motivation was, in large part, to preserve the physical fabric, because it had cultural meaning and artistic beauty and so on. We had a gut sense that it was

UP CLOSE more than that—that it was a community thing, too—but we didn’t know how to fully articulate it or defend it. I think it’s generally felt that a great old building is about more than just the physical thing, although the absolute beauty or rarity of that thing or what it says about its moment in time or its culture is all very powerful. But it’s not sculpture.

It’s not like a museum piece which has no other function except to be a beautiful thing to inspire you. This contains things, and it has a place in the environment.

But we didn’t have any statistics. We did a really early study funded by Pew back in the late ‘80s where we were trying desperately to find some data to articulate this. And we learned, for example, that one third of all daycare happens in churches, and that most Police Athletic Leagues are in churches. But it was scattered information. I think what helped move us in this direction is the stunning, stark fact that most donors don’t care that much about architecture. That’s not their thing, and religion is certainly not their thing. So you have to relate it to populations that they care about, and neighborhoods, whether it’s seniors, children, the homeless, the hungry, or the arts. And fortunately, these places relate to all that. But it took some time to position ourselves to be persuasive.

This is the story with preservation more generally, right?

People are talking about sustainability and community value and economic value and all this stuff that is sort of swirling around the thing itself.

There’s been a total quantum leap in what we understand the issue to be between 1989 and now. Back then, we were just trying to gather a database and an information center, do conferences and workshops and get known. Build bridges—that was our goal, to build bridges, because there had been so much acrimony.

I remember a board meeting in the mid-90s when one of our board members said, what goes on in these places during the week? We know what happens on Sunday morning if it’s a Christian church or on Friday night-Saturday morning if it’s a synagogue. But what happens the rest of the week? And no one knew! I still find that astonishing. No one in the seminary world knew, no one in religious studies knew, no one in preservation knew.

So that’s what led to our research that looked at a random sampling of sacred places with older buildings. What we learned—and this is what led us to where we are today—is that 81 percent of the people served by programs housed in those churches are not members. They’re coming from everywhere: Neighbors, kids, the homeless, the hungry.

These are de facto community centers. And that’s important, because congregations have shrunk, and they are financially strapped, often. So they need to make a case for help from beyond the congregation. That’s the bottom-line problem we have. Congregations need to tell their story and convince others to care.

And the sense is that churches, synagogues, and mosques are as vulnerable as they’ve ever been or moreso.

Yes, more than ever. We know how many have closed and been lost.

I don’t know if we know year by year, but it’s the general sense that it’s accelerating. Some denominations close en masse, like the Catholic Church, because it’s top-down. The Protestants tend to do it in a little trickle. But it’s all the same, whether it’s 20 at once or one or two a

year. One denomination in New York City said that 80 percent of its churches are going to close.

This is why this is really exciting and interesting and terrifying. Huge swaths of our communities are going to be effected, and very few people are really prepared for this or really thinking about it.

In an earlier study, we looked at just the value of the space that churches tend to share. Maybe it’s the old Sunday school that’s now daycare or it’s the old parish hall that’s now a dance studio. Now, we’ve added about 45 other factors, including the spending value of the congregation and the magnet effect, that people come to the neighborhood for an event and they spend money, the value of the community development activities it sponsors. Churches often become incubators for small nonprofits that form and grow and then move out.

We try to cover everything. And now, we’ve estimated that the overall value is $1.7 million on average for urban churches. And the percentage of people that are benefitting who aren’t members of the church has gone from 81 percent to 87 percent.

These places have traditionally housed so much value to a community, and it’s affordable and it’s accessible and it’s welcoming and people trust it. And they’re everywhere! Other kinds of buildings, you find them occasionally, but churches are in every neighborhood. We’re losing them, but for the moment, they’re still everywhere.

How else has your advocacy for sacred places changed?

There are two levels. There’s the national and regional level, where we’re trying to have a conversation with people in government, people in philanthropy, people in all the civic realms about this civic value thing. And then we have the local level: We have to help congregations themselves understand and embrace this. At the upper level, you might convince agencies and funders to be more open to helping a place transition or stay alive as a civic venture. But in a way, maybe it’s more important for congregations to grasp this and articulate it, and to act differently.

My belief is small congregations don’t need to close. That has huge implications for the survival of these great old buildings, but they need a helping hand to learn how to think in new ways about their buildings, including opening them up into the civic plaza—really lowering the barriers and not just having the occasional AA group. We have to model new ways for the community and for the church or synagogue to work together. And if we can encourage new thinking and use and funding and management, more of these places will stay open, which I think is a public good.

If you’re completely secular, you might say, who cares? They can become apartments. But the problem is, as they transition, some are demolished. And even when apartments are put in, much of the interior is gone, and all of that public good is gone. All the daycare is gone, all the concerts are gone, all the self-help groups are gone, all the food programs, all of it is gone. The facade may remain intact, but all the other public goods are gone. So I think this is a civic argument. This is the difficult challenge, saying this is really not about religion. n Jared Brey is a development, zoning policy, and city government freelance reporter based in Philadelphia, with work featured in Philadelphia Magazine, Hidden City, PlanPhilly, and The Philadelphia Inquirer.

AIA Philadelphia | context | SUMMER 2018 11

THIS ARTICLE WAS PREVIOUSLY PUBLISHED IN THE SUMMER 2018 ISSUE OF AIA PHILADELPHIA’S CONTEXT MAGAZINE

Sacred Places/Civic Spaces is a partnership between the Community Design Collaborative and Partners for Sacred Places to re-envision underutilized, purpose built religious properties as community hubs. The eighteen-month community-engaged design initiative is underwritten by the William Penn Foundation.

Partners for Sacred Places Social Media Facebook | @PartnersSacredPlaces Instagram | @sacredplaces

Community Design Collaborative Social Media Facebook | @cdesignc Twitter | @cdesignc_tweets Instagram |@cdesigncphl

AIA Philadelphia Social Media Facebook | @AIAPhiladelphia Twitter | @aiaphiladelphia Instagram | @aiaphiladelphia