By Coleman Warner
Times-Picayune (New Orleans)
Copyright 2006 The Times-Picayune Publishing Company
An early-morning fire tore through the historic Coliseum Place Baptist Church in the Lower Garden District on Thursday, destroying a 152-year-old mother church for local Baptist congregations and landing a fresh emotional blow in a neighborhood where the old Coliseum Theater burned in early February.
“The more vacant land we have in the historic districts, the less historic it’s going to be, and it’s happening now with major buildings,” said Banks McClintock, a writer and Coliseum Square Association board member.
Though Coliseum Baptist’s members have dwindled in number in the past few decades and recently shuttered the building, the Gothic-style church designed by architect John Barnett is known as New Orleans’ longest-standing Baptist church.
Historically white, with some racial mixing in recent years, Coliseum is believed to have organized Christian worship services for African slaves long before the Civil War. It was used as a staging point for Confederate and Union soldiers during the war. In 1917 it became the meeting place for Baptists organizing a training institute that would later become the New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary in Gentilly.
Neighbors reported recent incidents of vagrants breaking into and sleeping in the mostly idle church at 1376 Camp St., but New Orleans Fire Department investigators haven’t identified a likely cause of the fire.
Walls of the church still standing pose a threat, and an emergency demolition of what remains is expected today, Fire Department spokesman Greg Davis said.
“There has not been an investigation as of yet. The building is too dangerous,” he said.
The first fire alarm sounded at 1:53 a.m., and firefighters arrived in four minutes, officials said. The department’s response was quickly upgraded to five alarms, ultimately bringing in 82 firefighters and 27 units, and the fire was reported under control by 3:25 a.m.
The only damage reported to other structures in the densely built neighborhood was melted windows at the nearby Jackson School. Neighbors who mourned the loss of Coliseum Baptist praised firefighters strained by post-Hurricane Katrina conditions for averting a wider disaster. Firefighters perched atop tall ladders doused the blaze through the morning Thursday and reported no problems with low water pressure. None were injured.
Leaders of the Coliseum Baptist congregation, now totaling about 75, had months ago asked the New Orleans Historic District Landmarks Commission for permission to tear down the imposing brick building. Church Deacon John Curtis Jr., son of the late John T. Curtis Sr., who founded a Christian academy and previously served as pastor of Coliseum Baptist, said an engineering company hired by the church after Katrina concluded that there was some risk of collapse. But staff of the landmarks commission didn’t see any immediate risk of collapse and said the church would have to file a formal demolition application and face a review by a landmarks board, records show.
“What we were having to do was go through a long, tedious period of having to contact all of the people in that area, to notify them that we were going to apply for a demolition permit to get the structure torn down,” said Curtis, interviewed by telephone in Hawaii, where he is attending a relative’s wedding this week. “It wasn’t that we were necessarily going to do that (demolish). We just wanted to start that process in case we got to the point where we had to.”
The formal demolition permit application was never applied for, records of the landmarks agency show. They also reflect repeated concerns on the part of city inspectors that the church was engaged in “demolition by neglect” because it didn’t tend to broken windows, missing gutters, shifting masonry and other problems.
McClintock said the church building was repeatedly left open to vagrants and that he repeatedly ran people out, finding bedrolls inside.
Curtis conceded that break-ins were a problem but said he and other church members did try to secure the building, using padlocks and fencing and boards to cover openings.
Curtis said the church didn’t have the more than $1 million that was needed to restore the building properly, and he recently met with McClintock to discuss alternatives. McClintock said that he was “literally in the process of trying to find prospects” for the church when the fire intervened.
Preservation Resource Center Executive Director Patricia Gay said Coliseum Baptist was an excellent candidate for adaptive reuse. Developers have shown particular interest in turning mothballed churches into residential complexes, noting that just such a project is in the works Uptown on Valence Street.
“The neighborhood gets to keep that landmark building and they’re getting residential at the same time,” Gay said. “It can be done, and everybody wins.”
Coliseum Square Association board member Barbara Griffin noted that woodwork and other architectural details inside the building were in excellent shape and said neighbors wanted the church to secure the building and weigh selling it or giving it away so it could become a community center.
“It could have been a place for concerts, for the school (to use), a meeting hall, for theater performances,” Griffin said. “It had offices underneath that could have been rented.”
Curtis said his family and Coliseum Baptist’s remaining members, now holding services at Curtis Christian School in River Ridge, are grieving over the loss of the historic building. For lifelong Coliseum Square resident Paula Harmon, 35, who grew up Catholic but often attended events at the Baptist church, the fire tore at the neighborhood fabric.
“There were always weddings there when I was a kid. There was Sunday school in the back. I watched a lot of my friends get baptized in that church,” Harmon said as she gazed at the charred ruins. “Now it’s going to be a big old empty lot, like the theater.”