From the WSJ Opinion Archives
HOUSES OF WORSHIP
Pray and Pay
A Manhattan church sells advertising space.
NEW YORK--Never mind that business about a camel passing through the eye of a needle, said to be analogous, in its difficulty, to a rich man entering heaven. In ads all over town, Citibank has been telling us to "live richly," and it is now doing so on a huge billboard--140 feet long--above the portico of Grace Church, at Broadway and 10th Street. The avenue bends just where Grace Church stands, making the 1846 building visible for miles downtown, a beautiful neo-Gothic jewel nestled among taller structures, a sacred pause before Broadway veers uptown to theatrical fame.
But standing before the church, one now reads: "If happiness is just around the corner, turn often," near the Citibank logo and its "live richly" design. That corporate homily, as it happens, neatly follows the billboard it replaced only a few days ago--a luxury-car ad showing photos of Infiniti G-35 coupes.
It's all enough to distract you from the scaffolding that rises above, enclosing a handsome Gothic spire.
"We could whine, or we could get creative," says the Rev. David M. Rider, the Episcopalian priest in charge of Grace Church. He acknowledges the unseemliness of the commercial arrangement, but he explains that the ads' proceeds go to fund $2 million in church restorations.
Grace Church was designed by James Renwick, who was also responsible for St. Patrick's Cathedral uptown and the Smithsonian Institution building in Washington. Steven Semes, a New York architect and a fellow at the Institute of Classical Architecture, describes Grace Church as "lacy and delicate, with a whimsical, light touch, one of its great charms."
Dr. Rider loves the church's architecture, but he also notes that it's a "high-maintenance facility." The problems this time are structural. The spire has begun to lean about two degrees southwest, and the metal anchor that holds the cross in place has begun to corrode. Thirty of the spire's 90 stones will have to be replaced, he notes. Indeed, to raise money, the church will auction off the old ones at the end of the month.
Why is Grace Church in such dire straits? While Grace Church's original congregants were a wealthy set, Dr. Rider estimates that the neighborhood has changed five or six times since then, housing immigrants, artists, students and now young families. From its congregation and friends, Grace raised only $500,000. The rest of the restoration money has come from foundations. The billboards will cover just the $200,000 cost of the scaffolding itself.
One might think that Grace Church could rely on its sponsoring denomination for support. But with the exception of small grants to poor facilities, the Episcopal Church's finances are decentralized. Generally, each congregation is responsible for itself, according to Neva Rae Fox, communications director of the New York diocese.
This is not a new problem. St. John the Divine on New York's Upper West Side, a Gothic-style Episcopal cathedral dating from the 1890s, has still not been completed, and it was forced to put its own work, including renovation, on hiatus a few years ago. The estimated $40 million cost was simply too great. "In England," Mr. Semes says, "they call the problem 'redundant churches,' when you have many more churches that cost to keep up than parishes with the money to do so."
There is another problem, too. Older churches are often "landmarked," as are both St. John the Divine and Grace Church. They are thus not allowed to cut corners on restoration. And if such churches want to unload property they cannot care for, landmark status limits the range of potential buyers. There is no reason to doubt the aesthetic value of preservationist repair over the past 30 years or so, but such "unfunded mandates" are burdensome, and only become more so as churches age.
Are huge commercial billboards the answer? "It's rather bad form," says the architectural historian Franz Schulze, referring to the Infiniti ad, "to smear your name over a very beautiful church facade." But Infiniti would surely not have paid the same amount to have a note at the bottom of Sunday's Mass program. Mr. Semes is sympathetic to the church's plight. "I guess almost anything that it takes for them to be able to take care of the landmark I'd be willing to go along with, as long as it's temporary."
Evidently, Infiniti is not forever. But Grace Church may have to live richly for some time to come.
Ms. Schaefer is writing a book on religious colleges, to be published by St. Martin's in fall 2004.
