“The voices rose again, and the music swept on again, like fire, or flood, or
judgment. Then the church seemed to swell with the Power it held, and, like a
planet rocking in space, the temple rocked with the Power of God.”
Spirituality is remarkably spacious in James Baldwin’s autobiographical 1953
novel Go Tell It on the Mountain. But Baldwin wasn’t writing about a
soaring pastoral church with a steeple pointing to the sky. He was describing a
storefront church where his stepfather was a minister, a cramped building,
perhaps, but one that loomed large in his memory and in the lives of the
congregants.
Today, you can drive by 18 of these storefront churches in just three minutes
on West Fond du Lac Avenue. They crop up along a familiar expanse of Milwaukee
that is on the brink of extinction. The once proud buildings have slumped into
themselves and endured a string of humiliations: exteriors scarred with botched
renovation attempts, windows crudely filled in, faded or incomplete paint jobs
on walls that were already painted over several times and doors that are caged.
Storefront churches can rarely afford to concern themselves with appearances.
They were born out of racism in the rural South after the Civil War. After the
turn of the century, they helped African Americans adjust to life in the urban
North during the great migration. Then they became one of the central forces of
the 1960s civil rights movement. As gospel singer-turned-pop star Sam Cooke put
it, “Change Is Gonna Come.”
Alan Lomax haunted storefront churches when he was making the seminal
recordings of black music for the Library of Congress in the 1930s. The musical
ecstasy of these places shaped the work of many saxophone stylists, including
King Curtis, Ornette Coleman and Albert Ayler. Sam Cooke, Mahalia Jackson,
Marvin Gaye, Al Green, Aretha Franklin, Dionne Warwick, Wilson Picket, Lou
Rawls, James Brown and Otis Redding started in storefront churches in the 1950s.
And forever changed American music.
But it’s difficult to reconcile the richness of the culture with the
impoverished look of storefront churches. Their crosses turn buildings into
gravestones. In real estate terms, they denote the wrong location, the
neighborhood with the lowest assessments. Chicago, Minneapolis and Baltimore
have considered storefront churches, along with porn shops, a form of urban
blight. They attract the “wrong kind” of people. They’re too makeshift.
Add a cross or sign and – presto – a hardware store or corner pub becomes a
church. Anything can become a storefront church once it’s become a ruin. These
churches drift from one abandoned shell to another. When land values increase,
they go with the flow and migrate to newly distressed neighborhoods. They come
in clumps, sprout up like wildflowers.
Church building was not always so easy. Cathedrals could take centuries to
build. They were the most exalted projects of their time, spectacular monuments
to the glory of God and wealth of the church. Their magnificent forms dominated
the landscape, evoking awe.
Storefront churches remind us of the lesson that the meek shall inherit the
earth. Jesus stood against wealth and pretension. It’s what’s inside us that
matters most, a truth we can learn from the funky churches on Fond du Lac
Avenue.
Religion can always use a little more soul, and so can architecture.
Somewhere along the line, the meaning of some buildings was left behind and
replaced by a style that consists of a neutral box with a logo on top. The
effect can be comic, to judge by the diner pictured below. Increasingly, you
find signs displacing structure as a source of meaning in strip malls.
Storefront churches are also just a building with a sign, butthey are
anything but neutral – they preserve layers of meaning. They are more honest
than “historically sensitive” architecture like the 1980s-era office buildings
Downtown that merely refer to the past by impersonating City Hall.This is ersatz
history. Storefronts churches are real. They embody the persistence of the past.
They are poignant entities, showing us how both people and buildings can be
saved.
According to Camilo Jose Verga, a MacArthur fellow who studies the skeletal
remains of cities and storefront churches, “The ministers, their wives and other
church officials who were interviewed lacked a design vocabulary and attributed
their formal choices to the will of God.”
Some of these churches feature loving and naive hand-painted imagery. This
seems so quaint today, like a thank-you note written with a fountain pen. The
texture of these buildings reminds us that human eccentricities are a pleasure,
that not everything needs to be polished.
The haphazard rehabs of storefront churches are full of surprises. Sometimes
there are odd juxtapositions between different times and styles of architecture.
When large sections are whited out by slapdash coverings, the form of the
original building is clarified like a minimalist work of art. Odd mixes of old
stone and cheap siding challenge traditional ideas of material harmony. If the
job is only half done, as it often is, the random shards of the past become
ornamentation. None of this always makes sense. Storefront churches have an
irrational exuberance.
They are an antidote to bland corporate parks, shopping malls and
over-refined contemporary architecture. They are improvisational collages
imbedded into the fabric of a city. A form of anti-architecture, a rebellion
against the glossiness of a culture that conceals more than it reveals.
Think of some of the new large redevelopment projects with “homey” facades,
such as Bayshore mall. As developers squeeze the life out of buildings, it
wouldn’t hurt to have more spontaneity in our architecture. Authenticity often
comes with a little funk and a few rough edges. Some grit and soul would give us
room to move and breath. Storefront churches are untidy, but so is the human
condition.
