One of the most famous buildings in Baltimore, Mount Vernon United Methodist Church,
has been acquired by a nonprofit preservation group created for just this purpose:
At a closing held on July 10 in Baltimore City, UNITE Mount Vernon, Inc. became the new owner of the 153-year-old Mount Vernon United Methodist Church. . . . UNITE Mount Vernon Inc. acquired the church with a forward-facing vision for community activation and public benefit. UNITE Mount Vernon Inc. is a recently formed non-stock corporation which has applied for IRS 501(c)3 non-profit status.
The church was designed by Thomas Dixon and built in 1872. It sits on Mount Vernon Square right across from one of the oldest monuments to George Washington.
It's quite a lovely building, but that didn't help it stay viable as a church; when the Methodist entity that owned it
put it up for sale last year they said it had a congregation of 25.
The cost for the land and construction was $400,000, in 1872 dollars. Last year a developer bid $1 million for the church and adjacent townhouse, but died before the sale went through, so it was back on the market this year at an asking price of $600,000. Nearby townhouses have been selling for more than a million. It seems to me this might say something interesting about our time: a gorgeous old church is less valuable in our oh-so-domestic world than a nice house.
So far no indication what the new owners plan to do with the church. Might make a nice concern venue, but there are already two churches in that neighborhood known for hosting concerts, so I don't know that there would be much demand.
1 comment:
The cost for the land and construction was $400,000, in 1872 dollars. Last year a developer bid $1 million for the church and adjacent townhouse, but died before the sale went through, so it was back on the market this year at an asking price of $600,000. Nearby townhouses have been selling for more than a million. It seems to me this might say something interesting about our time: a gorgeous old church is less valuable in our oh-so-domestic world than a nice house.
Going off online inflation calculators, the church was around the equivalent of $10 million when it was built, which is rather a lot.
As for its value today, I don't quite think it says as much about the modern world as you think it does. The bulk of the cost (indeed, the bulk of the construction itself) was in the stonework - most of a church in that style is empty space, enclosed by those showily tall walls and roofs, covered in devout frippery whose only purpose is to demonstrate how expensive it was to make, in order to better suggest the impressiveness of wealth.
You wouldn't want to live in a church, even back when this one was built, so the comparison to homes is more than a little strange. It's a deeply impractical kind of edifice, designed mostly for the sake of showing off. It is a display of conspicuous opulence - a statement from a religious congregation on their capacity to amass and flaunt wealth, ostensibly to demonstrate their supposed piety.
So I, for one, am not surprised that for the same original price in modern dollars, you could have around ten overpriced million dollar "townhouses" for wealthy inhabitants, or probably an entire apartment complex for the non-wealthy could fit in the same area of land as the church takes up. And of course those would be more valuable to people - they're inherently more useful buildings, even if the townhouses are still significantly about showing off material wealth.
Post a Comment