Abstract
This interview was conducted at Cleveland State University with Michael Tevesz, founder and former director for the Sacred Landmarks project. The first part of the interview traces the beginnings of the project when it began in the mid 1980s. Different aspects of the project is discussed along with the published works documenting Cleveland and Lorain area sites. There was an exhibition held at Cleveland State University featuring sites between 1830 and 1990 by photographer T. Lewis. There was also a course created in the Urban Studies department featuring the buildings and congregations. There are tours on Sundays to view churches and styles. It should be noted there is a masters thesis in every congregation. The rest of the interview focuses on architecture and areas of research interest. There is also discussion of the nature of the congregations and changing demographics. The final closing remarks includes talk about the current initiatives and the work that needs to continue.
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Interviewee
Tevesz, Michael (interviewee)
Interviewer
Lanese, James (interviewer); Valore, Kenneth (interviewer)
Project
Sacred Landmarks
Date
11-1-2011
Document Type
Oral History
Duration
55 minutes
Recommended Citation
"Michael Tevesz Interview, 2011" (2011). Cleveland Regional Oral History Collection. Interview 127020.
https://engagedscholarship.csuohio.edu/crohc000/382
Transcript
James Lanese [00:00:01] Good morning. [00:00:02] My name is Jim Lanese and I’m joined by Ken Valore and Mike Tevesz to conduct an interview for the Center for Public History and Digital Humanities to document the history of the center for Sacred Landmarks. The interview is being held at Cleveland State University in Cleveland, Ohio. For introductory purposes, could everyone please state their name and affiliation with the Center for Sacred Landmarks?
Michael Tevesz [00:00:31] My name is Mike Tevesz. I’m the founder and former director of the Center for Sacred Landmarks. And my current position with respect to the Sacred Landmarks related work I’m doing is Professor Emeritus and also Senior Fellow in the Urban Center in the Urban College at Cleveland State. I should add as well that I am also now listed as the founding editor of the Sacred Landmark series, which is a series of books on that topic that is published collaboratively between Kent State University and Cleveland State University.
James Lanese [00:01:14] Thanks, Mike. Could you provide a little deeper description of the Center for Sacred Landmarks, how long it has been in place, and some of the highlights of its early history?
Michael Tevesz [00:01:31] The Center for Sacred Landmarks existed in various forms, under various names, for approximately 25 years. It was begun in the mid-1980s in the then College of Arts and Sciences at Cleveland State as a study group among people that were interested in the art, architecture, and history of houses of worship, particularly those in Cleveland and Northeast Ohio. The group at the time was called the Sacred Landmarks. Well, it was first called the Sacred Landmarks Research Group. It moved to the Urban College in the mid-’90s, where it was became the Sacred Landmarks Initiative and then later the Center for Sacred Landmarks. And I directed it along the way. The center existed up to the time of my retirement in 2010, and although it no longer officially exists, its work goes on. And one of my assignments as a Senior Fellow in the Urban Center is to continue that work. The book series goes on. The Sacred Landmark series consists of very, very pretty, very informative, very well written by very bright authors, hardcover books with dust jackets on various aspects of sacred landmarks. And the scope of the series is worldwide. And the topics that we cover are really quite diverse. The very first book in the series was essentially a picture book with essays by a very brilliant photographer named Michael Levy. And he focused on, I guess, pun intended, the African American faith communities of Cleveland. And the book is a gorgeous testament to the important work that these congregations do and sort of their beauty, their beauty within the city of Cleveland. It’s one of the very few books that actually dealt with African American churches, which are very prevalent, even predominant in the inner-city neighborhoods and beyond. And that’s a very fine book. Our other authors include Stephen Fleagle, who is the Curator of Medieval Art at the Cleveland Museum of Art, and he produced a very fine book for us on medieval treasuries. And in fact, he has another book coming out in the series in February of 2012. This is just coming up. It has a neat title. It’s called A Higher Contemplation Sacred Meaning in Christian Art of the Middle Ages. It’ll be a very beautiful, very informative book. Doug Hoffman, a very fine architect who was a former architect, national architect for the Methodist Church in America, produced a book for us that came out a year or so ago on essentially seeking the sacred. In other words, what does an architect do to create sacred space? What are the parameters, in a way, architecturally, what makes a sacred place sacred? So that’s a pretty neat. Well, it’s a very neat book too, by a very bright author. So we’ve been very fortunate in getting top caliber writers and experts to produce books for the series. Prior to that, we had lots of publications as well. They weren’t quite as fancy with hardcovers and dust jackets. This constituted our monograph series. And so going way back to 1990, and that was with funding from the George Gunn foundation, we began publishing a literature on sacred landmarks. And the reason for this was that for the Cleveland area, basically no literature had appeared before, at least not much. And so we saw this as an opportunity. So it took a lot of bright people doing a lot of research and writing. And we probably have now, if you count all the publications, the monographs, the books, books that are coming out, we probably have upwards of about 20 publications. So I’m not exaggerating when I said that we have worked to create a literature. I might point out too that we have a very productive, very with it partner in the Sacred Landmarks Initiative at Lorain County Community College. They began an organization modeled after ours back around 1998 and under the direction of Cheryl Piper, who’s now retired. But the work of that initiative goes on. They did a lot of brilliant work in Lorain County. They’re still doing it, and we had many very successful collaborations with them. So the Sacred Landmarks Initiative of Lorain County is well worth talking about. The context of the Center for Sacred Landmarks here.
James Lanese [00:07:20] You alluded to the scope of Sacred Landmarks’ focus as being worldwide and especially with respect to the publications that are included. However, there is a very local focus as well with respect to Cleveland area institutions. Could you elaborate a bit on institutions in the region that have been-
Michael Tevesz [00:07:50] Well, our initial focus was on the Cleveland area. Because again, if you go to a library, do some research, there is virtually nothing done in an organized way. Prior to the publication of Armstrong et al. In 1992 by Kent State Press, A Guide to Cleveland Sacred Landmarks, that was literally a landmark publication. There had been other efforts before that. The County Archives had done a very, very fine Sacred Landmarks exhibition prior to that. Gosh, it was a long time ago, I forget the dates exactly. And they had produced a publication for that. However, it’s very difficult, it’s very difficult to find. It was in a little, almost like a little folder. The publications were, or the photographs were not bound, the illustrations were not bound. And so while it was a very important effort, a very successful effort, it’s very, very difficult to locate that. So with Armstrong et al. And we certainly helped with that publication, the systematic study of the sacred landmarks of churches, synagogues, temples, mosques from this area was well underway. Prior to that we had done other things as well. Back in 1990 we had a very nice exhibition at the Cleveland State, at the Cleveland State Art Gallery, I think it was called Cleveland Sacred Landmarks 1830–1930: A Pilgrimage, focused on houses of worship that were built in that interval. And it had lots of artifacts, lots of photographs. The photographer for that exhibition, the late Thomas L. Lewis, who was also the chair of the Geology Department, Department of Geological Sciences at the time. His work was so instrumental in making that a success. And you know, other contributors, just a couple of others that you know, there were many. And so I know I’m going to leave someone out, but the Reverend David A. Novak, Sister Donna Kristof for example, and others played a major role in that exhibition. So since then we’ve collaborated on lots of exhibitions, there are lots of publications. We created a course called Cleveland Sacred Landmarks. It’s now called Sacred Landmarks. It continues to be taught by Dr. Virginia Benson in the Urban College. In fact it’s being offered this semester. So we really did everything that we could think of to shed light on these rather little known buildings and congregations and get this information out to the public in non technical terms. One of the things that occurred to me back in the early ’80s, I started on Sunday mornings driving around town and looking at and visiting these places because usually most of these places, not all, but most of them are open on Sundays and there are other denominations that don’t use Sundays and so they’re open when they’re open. But I would drive around mainly on Sundays and just this was in the early ’80s and say to myself, wow, look at those neat onion domes. Well, look at that - and I didn’t know it at the time - Richardsonian Romanesque inspired tower. I learned this stuff later. After all, my academic background, my professional background is in paleontology. And so I just was fascinated, captivated by these places. You’d go to Tremont, all sorts of different houses of worship of different denominations. Very beautiful. And it occurred to me that these tend to be objects of mystery, except for the people in the congregation that go there. They know about them, but even sometimes they don’t know all about them. I remember visiting an Episcopal church in Detroit. I attended a service. It was done by an older version. It was done according to an older version of the Book of Common Prayer. So I sort of like the old stuff. And afterwards I thought, boy, these are really interesting opalescent glass windows. So I climbed up on some registers and was sort of like a gecko on the wall or something like that, trying to look at signatures because I thought these look like Tiffany windows. Now, what people generally do, if it’s an opalescent glass window, they’ll say, oh, we have Tiffany windows. Well, often they’re not Tiffany windows, but that style of opalescent glass suggests Tiffany, and so they’ll claim them as Tiffany. This happens around town here. I won’t name the names of the congregations. You know, we’ll let them sort of continue thinking they have Tiffanys. That’s okay. It doesn’t hurt. But Tiffanys are not all that common. Well, at any rate, one of the people, one of the ushers came up to me, not in a threatening way, but in a curious way, saying, what are you doing? I said, well, you know what? I think you have Tiffany windows here. And hey, take a look here in this bottom right hand corner. There’s the Tiffany studio mark. There’s the signature on some of these windows. It had version of William Comfort Tiffany’s signature. And he said, oh, my gosh. He said, I knew these were nice windows. I’ve been a congregant here for 25 years. I never knew we had Tiffany windows. And so I said, well, yeah, you do. You do. Just look in the lower right-hand corner. It says so. So I think the whole premise for our group was forming and studying was worthwhile in that these are very interesting places, very interesting buildings, very interesting congregations with histories that, quite frankly, people don’t know a heck of a lot about and where there is very, very little organized information. Still, I’m convinced there’s a master’s thesis lurking within every congregation. There’s still so much work to be done in terms of the 25 years or so that we’ve. Another good pun would be devoted to this. I think we’ve made contributions and I’ll even go so far as to say perhaps even significant contributions, but at the same time, we’ve just scratched the surface. There’s still so much more to do, still so much more to explore. And it’s sort of a time limited proposition. As you may notice, some of these big, neat places are disappearing. And so, you know, we need to get what information we can recorded before they go. If they can be saved, great, that would be a great thing. But obviously they all can’t be saved. There’s acts of nature, there’s deliberate acts of closure. And so these places are disappearing. And so we got to get to them and learn some things about them that we can preserve before they, before they go.
James Lanese [00:15:41] As the Center’s work progressed in the ’80s and ’90s, was there a deliberate list of sites in the region that you were focused upon, or would they just evolve based on interests and other factors?
Ken Valore [00:16:06] I should say, yeah, that was my question. How did you pick out the various ones that you included?
Michael Tevesz [00:16:16] We started as a complete group of non specialists, not knowing what we’re doing, but being very enthusiastic about the subject. And so we sort of wrote our script as we went along, driven by our interests. When we talk about sacred landmarks, the work of my center focused on buildings. Obviously there’s much more to sacred landmarks than just buildings. There are sacred groves and mountains and holy sites. And when people come together to worship, they could do that out in a field someplace, and that perhaps then is sacred ground, even though there’s no buildings visible for miles. So we just moved forward, driven by our interest. And what had first captivated me was this great stock of interesting and mysterious buildings. And so I selected some that I thought, well, we have to study these or we have to bring more attention to them. So the older, more historical, the more interesting architecturally. The ones with the most interesting congregational histories, the ones with the neatest religious art and windows, sculpture, liturgical objects really came to the fore. And so we, we focused on the big, the pretty, the historical, the ones with all the neat objects. But we branched beyond that. Storefront churches are very important, for example, and we’re looking for a publisher. There’s a very bright fellow that works for the Federal Reserve bank of Cleveland. He’s a lawyer for the Fed. He has this beautiful manuscript on storefront churches. And we’d love to Find a publisher for that. So often when a neighborhood is almost completely gone, a storefront church will appear in a building that was formerly used for something else. It could have been a garage or where mechanics worked, or a restaurant or a pool hall or something, something like that. So these are neat and important places, too. It’s very difficult to get information about them. This guy did, and I really praise his intrepidness and dedication to research. So what I’m doing is trying to answer your question, saying that our research was initially driven by our interest, and then it broadened beyond that to try to be more complete still. It’s pretty much focused on buildings, what’s inside them, and congregational history. So that means there’s all sorts of neat things that could be done above and beyond. This whole project can continue to grow, include Indian burial mounds, Native American burial mounds, and all sorts of neat and important and beautiful things like that. Literally, there’s no end to what we can do, not only in Cleveland, but beyond. I do like to go to Italy, and it’s neat to go over there and see how those houses of worship and their artworks have been so lovingly preserved over the centuries. We could really learn from the Europeans, from the Italians, about dealing with our sacred treasures here. And so, in a way, Italy, to me, shows us what is possible. Obviously, they have some things there a little older than ours, but we have very beautiful things here, too, that are well worth preserving, well worth studying, well worth valuing.
Ken Valore [00:20:39] In Italy. Go to. Does the Italian government take responsibility for the preservation?
Michael Tevesz [00:20:46] The Italian government takes responsibility for preservation in some cases. Right now, with Berlusconi having his problems and the Euro having problems, and the whole economy in not only Italy, but in many other countries in Europe being somewhat imperiled. This imperils those efforts. For example, in 2013, from February 17 through June 2, there will be an exhibition at the Cleveland Museum of Art centered on the Caporali Missal, which is a beautiful, complete Roman Catholic missal that was completed in, I believe it was, 1469. According to the notation in the colophon and illustrated by Bartolomeo and Geppecco Caporali, this is neat, the center for sacred landmarks. The work that we did contributed to this exhibition. And in fact, my girlfriend Beth, and our friend Tony Zaccardelli, along with Stephen Fleagle, the curator of medieval art at the Cleveland Museum of Art, I should say Beth Singer, give her last name as well, made several trips to Italy to do research on the background of the missile that could be and its Context that could be used for this exhibition. So at any rate, the connection with Italy is interesting and important. And so we feel that the center has made a contribution to this collaboration with a major world class, one of the finest art museums in the world. And we’re very grateful to them that they would focus on this topic. Actually, the idea for the exhibition is the brainchild of the curator Steven Fleagle. But wow, it was sure great working. Beth, Tony and I had a great time working with Steven on this project.
James Lanese [00:23:09] One of the speaking of Italy connections. At least one interview we were involved with, and I believe it was St. James alluded to, to the founding pastor when he was planning the church building, made trips to Italy and would have a very specific church in Italy that inspired the architecture and the design and the deck decorated of the church that was being built here in Cleveland. And I assume that’s not a unique.
Ken Valore [00:23:52] Well, basically it was Sicily. It’s based on a Sicilian church, if I remember right.
Michael Tevesz [00:23:58] Indeed, indeed. Let me. You know, I wandered off there for a little bit and I didn’t completely answer your question. So let me just say, as we were talking about Berlusconi and governments and support for. And government support for historical preservation of houses of worship in Italy. Yeah, that’s going on. And I did give this example of this Italian related project that we have. But what I also need to mention, and this is a sad fact, that although the exhibition will be in Cleveland, during those dates we were going to move the exhibition to Perugia. And you might remember Perugia from the Amanda Knox case and stuff like that in Umbria, which was close to where the missile was used in a church in Montoni in Umbria. In fact, the missile may have been produced or illustrated actually in Perugia by Bartolomeo Caporali and Geppecco, where Bartolomeo had his workshop. After the exhibition closed in Cleveland, it was going to move to the National Gallery of Umbria in Perugia. But they had to very, very sadly pull the plug on that move because the Italian government had cut all the funding that was government funding to the museum, and so they were really struggling to try to make ends meet. So we had this nice arrangement. The exhibition was gonna move from Cleveland to Perugia, but government funding was pulled not just for this exhibition, but for the whole of that poor museum. It’s a beautiful place, beautiful museum. We visited it in 2008. So one wonders what this means for the level of ongoing support by the Italian government for Italian houses of worship. So perhaps that now more fully completes the answer to that question. I like this stuff enough, and I just sort of go wandering off, but I also want to come wandering back to answer the question. So you’re talking about The Church of St. James in Lakewood. Well, it just so happens in May, Beth Singer, Tony Zaccardelli, and I visited the two beautiful houses of worship in Sicily that were used as the General models for St. James and Lakewood. These are the. These are basilicas, cathedrals. Well, let’s see. The one in Monreale, which is just south of Palermo, is, I believe, a cathedral. I’m not sure the one in Cefelu is. At any rate, these are both magnificent churches. And when you see the inside of one and the outside of the other, you say, okay, I can see what that pastor, what inspired that pastor to do St. James. In fact, the interior of St. James is really highly derived from the interior of the cathedral at Monreale. These are great, beautiful places. And I can’t imagine any two more stunning models for a church. The church in Cefelu has this beautiful image, the most gorgeous image, powerful image of Christ Pantocrator in the upper third of the apse. And it’s the outside of that church that reminded us of the exterior of St. James. It’s the interior of the church or of the cathedral in Monreale that reminded us. And so this was just. Well, one, we were just overcome by the beauty of both of these places. And the other thing is, Sicily has to be- There isn’t any place on earth more beautiful than Sicily. Sicily, in my opinion, it is just great. And then to see these churches, these magnificent buildings there was almost overpowering. So that is a good, specific example that you brought up of a pastor here being inspired by European models past, but perhaps not as specifically, perhaps not as focused. I mean, this guy said, okay, we’re going to use the outside of Cefolu and we’re going to use the inside of Monoriale, and we’re going to have this really neat church. And he succeeded in his vision. I think in many other cases, it’s a lot more general in that we develop some native architectural styles here. You know, Frank Lloyd Wright did, Henry Hobson, Richardson did. We had these neat revivals, you know, Greek Revival, Egyptian Revival, you know, neoclassicism and all. So in a very general way, a lot of our religious buildings draw on European models of. Of architecture, but in a more general way, and also in the interior of churches, there’s lots of connections to Europe as well. If you go to the Church of St. Rocco on the near west side, our friend Tony Zaccardelli was from the town of the village of Goriano Sicoli in Abruzzo. And so in the Church of St. Rocco, he grew up in that neighborhood. There’s a special shrine to Santa Gemma, who is the patroness of the village of Goriano Sicoli. And then you go from niche to niche in Saint Rocco and you see the patrons or patronesses. And, you know, we’re talking about this on All Saints day. This is November 1, 2011. And so this is very chronologically cogent, I think. So we go from the outside to the inside. And so statues and decorations as well are highly inspired by European models. In many cases, and also in cases like Saint Rocco’s the same saints are venerated. They’re highly localized saints. I mean, not many people venerate Santa Gemma outside of Goriano Sicoli unless you happen to be someone from Goriano Sicoli living in another part of Italy or in the United States. So what the priest did at St. James in Lakewood, in a very specific way is very generalizable, both interiorly and exteriorly to Europe and European models, to greater or lesser degrees of specificity.
Ken Valore [00:31:28] It was interesting when we did the interview at St. Ann’s that the pastor there, I mean, there’s no really internal decoration at all. And a lot of the internals he bought during the Depression from bankrupt banks. And the style of the church, really the bishop never wanted him to build, was kind of more like a temple than a Catholic church.
Michael Tevesz [00:32:07] It’s interesting that you talk about St. Ann’s. And I guess the pastor was very resourceful, getting, I guess a lot of banks failed. And so he probably got pretty good deals on all of this nice marble, all of these. All these nice things. You bring up a very good point. You say, well, it’s more like a temple. And perhaps one could see that somehow Greek or Roman temple style, it’s, I think, important. So you bring up a very good point. It’s often a little of this and a little of that. The Cleveland area churches, a lot of churches in the US Are very eclectic in the sense that, well, you can see a little bit of the Romanesque, but then again, well, gee, the windows are pointy, and they take from the Gothic. I guess what we need to remember is that real Gothic and real Romanesque only existed in Europe. These places that were built during specific periods in time in the 1000s, or just say the 11th century or the 13th century or the 14th century. All those styles, in terms of their purity, originated over there and here. Often we tend to take bits and pieces here and there and from St. Ann’s from banks. And so that’s sort of the American way, that sort of resourcefulness and a blending of cultures, and in this case, a blending of architectural styles and decorations. So, Ken, the point you bring up is very interesting. So we’re eclectic. I don’t want to use the term and say we’re mutts, but, you know, whatever fits. Maybe very respectable mutts.
Ken Valore [00:34:09] From our interviews, it seems like the originating pastor in most cases had a lot to do with how the church, the style, etc.-
Michael Tevesz [00:34:22] I think that the pastor at the time a building was conceived, designed, exerted a great influence. Just say in the case of Catholic churches back in the day. The pastor had a lot of power and authority, and I don’t think could be overruled by a parish council or something like that. He was sort of like a prince that reported to the, you know, sort of the prince of the parish that reported to the bishop, which would have been, you know, somewhat higher up in the hierarchy. It’s essentially sort of like a feudal system where certain people had a lot of power. And so perhaps it’s not too surprising that the person that had a lot of power had a lot of say in terms of vision of what the house of worship was going to look like.
James Lanese [00:35:19] And we heard some very interesting stories where there were disputes between the pastor and the bishop that resulted in variations in design as well as status, status of the pastor himself, I guess, regarding.
Michael Tevesz [00:35:38] Plans to move forward, I think, Jim, in terms of what you’re bringing up, that resonates with what I recall reading about, perhaps for the Church of St. Stanislaus. I think the pastor and the bishop weren’t the best of buddies and had some disagreements. And then there are all these interesting stories that go along with that. The very high spires that cap the towers at St. Stanislaus apparently blew off in a tornado, and one of them landed on some poor kid, killed him. And I think I have that story correctly. And so there were no more towers after that. Maybe that extra high spire was looked at as, you know, the Greeks would use the term hubris. Perhaps. Perhaps the priest had reached, literally reached too far. This is what’s so neat. These stories, these histories, they add so much richness and color to our culture and perhaps help us understand better who we are, how we got here. And it’s that sort of information, just like you brought up, that has to be preserved. That- That has to be preserved. And in these squabblings and battles of egos and like, it really reveals the humanness of religion, religious hierarchy and the like. Sort of a real confluence of the sacred and secular in the pursuit of an expression of religious architecture.
Ken Valore [00:37:23] The other thing that in many cases, in the ethnic. Excuse me, ethnic things, in many cases, it seemed like the parishioners actually helped build the churches, which wouldn’t happen today.
Michael Tevesz [00:37:41] Well, I think today the way the parishioners help build churches is by contributing money. It’s sort of interesting. You know, the parishioners pay for it, and then in the old days, they helped build it. In fact, there’s a story associated with St. Patrick’s on Bridge Avenue that the- I think it was St. Patrick’s on Bridge Avenue, and correct me if I’m wrong, that the parishioners actually went with wagons somewhere out west where there was limestone and carted the limestone back and, you know, with the work of their own hands, helped put up the building. Some architect designed it, some builder paid for it, but the people themselves helped raise the walls, in fact, to the point of going and getting the stones to do that. So today, I think it’s mainly money. In the old days, it was money and sweat. But interestingly then, that in the end, all belongs to the bishop and who seems to have the power to dispose of it as he wants to. So it’s an interesting situation of where the money came from, where the effort came from, and who ends up having the ultimate say as to the fate of the building.
James Lanese [00:39:06] One of the phenomenon that has occurred to me. [00:39:10] Through the opportunity to visit with folks from the Catholic churches and the temples, for example, it seems to be the pattern in Cleveland among the Jewish congregations where as the congregation moved eastward and southward, for example, they would reestablish their religious facility and congregation to the new location where the majority of the congregation resided. The Catholics, on the other hand, as the population spread in every direction, simply built more churches as they went. Now we see the phenomenon of, and the dilemma of, closing churches in the wake of lower membership. Whereas the Jewish model seems to be that as they left temples behind in the city, they sold them or contributed them to new congregations that now occupy space. What kind of insights do you have concerning that?
Michael Tevesz [00:40:38] I think that’s a fascinating observation. If you go to Liberty Hill Baptist Church out along Euclid Avenue, I think it’s out in the 80s somewhere out there. The congregation today is predominantly an African American congregation, but up until. Until, I think, 1956. This was the Euclid Avenue temple. So you go inside and look around and there’s stained glass windows with menorahs depicted on them and beautiful windows. Those are really Tiffany windows, if I recall, and with a lot of Judaic iconography on them. So just sort of a neat thing. The new inhabitants of the building respected many elements of what was there before this was a holy place. And so you see this again, this blending, this eclecticism of one imprint sort of merged with another with that of the new congregation. It is an interesting model and it’s a very practical thing too. It’s like, well, gee, you know, your congregation is no longer in this neighborhood, so why not put up your place of worship where it is? I mean, it makes a lot of sense. And so you move on and you adapt to current circumstances. It makes- It makes a lot of sense. And so the buildings are recycled, they’re used, and then sometimes they’re ultimately abandoned as well by the second congregation. Maybe there’s a third congregation. But then the buildings get so old after a while, and in the old days, they built these huge places that there’s no such things as energy efficient windows in them or modern heating systems that. So you were faced with in using some of these old buildings, enormous heating bills and leaking roofs that would cost tens of thousands of dollars to repair. With the Catholic model of building new churches, but sort of leaving the old ones behind as Catholic congregations, that has both, you know, that has both positive and negative features, I guess one could say. For the positive feature, you maintain a building with its original function still in place, albeit with a much smaller congregation. So you can go into the inner city, a place like, for example, the gorgeous Church of St. Stephen on West 54th Street, and just see the beauty, the art, the architecture that is maintained and continues to inspire us, make us feel good when we see it and we appreciate it, and really create a sense of a holy place. On the other hand, a lot of these places now you see a few people rattling around in a really huge space on a Sunday morning. But for those few people, these places mean the world to them. It is their holy place, their sacred site, their spiritual home. So, yes, there are at least a couple of models. Each has its practicality or some aspects of problems. I guess there’s no ideal way of doing this. But yeah, there’s definitely at least two modes of adapting. There are at least two modes of dealing with changing demographics.
Ken Valore [00:44:55] The other thing we found with both Catholic and the Jewish congregations was they were primarily Geographically specific. Even in the Jewish congregation, Jews from Germany had a congregation. Jews from some other place had another congregation. Which is no different than the Catholics having Hungarian churches, Czech churches, Italian churches, German churches. So across the religions, the ethnic background carried the same weight, it seemed.
Michael Tevesz [00:45:37] It’s very interesting that the ethnic background carried that kind of weight. I suppose it always has and always will. You wonder, as a result, will there ever be peace on earth? And I can think of an example on the west side. Again, I’ll reference St. Stephen’s on West 54th Street. Well, 11 blocks to the west around West 65th Street, there’s the church of St. Colman. Well, that’s an Irish parish. And 11 blocks over there’s a German ethnic parish, at least in terms of the founding members. And so the question would be, why would you need such huge beautiful churches, two of them so close together? Why? Well, there’s probably no German ever went over in the old days, went over to Colman’s. And no self respecting Irish person would perhaps go to St. Stephen’s maybe I’m wrong about that. But these many of these places in the beginning represented a very specific ethnicity. And certainly ethnicity and religion are very highly correlated and have been both a source of inspiration in art and global strife I think throughout human history. It’s just interesting to see the local manifestation of that. Perhaps it’s breaking down a little bit in the US in terms of marriages across religions and perhaps some of the religions not being as strict about their rules and their membership criteria as they were in the old days. But what you mentioned is definitely still with us and in a large measure responsible for the, this great number of beautiful old buildings.
Ken Valore [00:47:38] Well, I think in Tremont, I mean, how many churches are in Tremont and they’re all different ethnicities and they’re right next to each other.
Michael Tevesz [00:47:49] I’m thinking about in terms of what you said, the corner of Starkweather Avenue or the intersection of Starkweather avenue and West 14th street, because on the southwest corner you have Pilgrim Congregational Church, just down the street to the, just down 14th street to the south you have Zion United Church of Christ. And I guess at one point I should know this very crisply, but I don’t. There was a meeting of the congregations in the formation of the, what’s this called? The Congregationalists. And another group at least came together to form the UCC. So I guess they’re both essentially UCC, but in the old days I don’t think the people from Zion mixed much with the people from Pilgrim. And then if you go the other way, across the intersection to the north, there’s what was, I think, a former Methodist church that’s now a Hispanic evangelical congregation. And then across 14th street, directly across 14th street from Pilgrim, you have St. George Syrian Orthodox Church, which is a completely different liturgy and reflects a different liturgy, a different ethnicity. So, yeah, all these places so close by and. Well, we know in the old days there was a lot of employment. If you just walked east, you went down into the valley, there were all the steel mills. There was a lot of manufacturing on the west side of the Cuyahoga at that time. And you could have. There are many job opportunities. I don’t know if the jobs paid all that well. People didn’t have cars, so you had a lot of people living close to where they worked. They could walk to work and also they would walk to church. And so you don’t want the church too far away. And since these were different ethnic groups and different denominations, you weren’t going to. The Congregationalists weren’t going to go and pal up with the Methodists. Each needed their own place. Again, it’s a little different today, but, yeah, Tremont is fantastic in terms of the diversity of its houses of worship. So many, so close together.
Ken Valore [00:50:34] Is that unique to Cleveland or is that similar in other places like Pittsburgh or Chicago or-
Michael Tevesz [00:50:47] I don’t think that concentration and that diversity is necessarily unique to Cleveland, although people point to Tremont as being special. But it’s probably not unique anywhere. You had a large city where there were a lot of different migrant groups, you know, living there. Wherever you had the situation, I think you had similar circumstances. Chicago comes to mind. You could probably come up with similar scenarios for Chicago. New York City, for example. You mentioned Pittsburgh. That’s a great example as well. But then when you get to cities where there are only. Where there are fewer ethnic groups, then you wouldn’t see this as much. Although even in that case, an ethnic. A group from one part of one country, you can imagine them really not wanting to associate with fellow countrymen that were from a different part of the country, a different county, something like that. So even within countries and within denominations, you could get this sort of separation. But I think Cleveland is a really good example of this type of diversity reflected in a diversity of architectural styles. But wherever you had similar circumstances of many different immigrant groups settling down in the same place, you’ll probably see a similar diversity of churches and other houses of worship.
James Lanese [00:52:34] Earlier, you alluded to the one publication from the center focused on the African American church In Cleveland, we haven’t had too many opportunities yet to visit.
Ken Valore [00:52:53] Some.
James Lanese [00:52:53] Of the churches, but we do know many of them are converted temples or other churches that occupied the space prior to them. Comment a bit on that phenomenon in Cleveland and elsewhere.
Michael Tevesz [00:53:11] Well, there’s a good book in process. There’s a good draft of it, and it will eventually be published, published by the Sacred Landmark series between Cleveland State and Kent State University Press. And it’s all about adaptive reuse. And when we talk about adaptive reuse in houses of worship, one could say, well, what do you do with a used synagogue? What do you do with a used church? Do you tear it down or can you find some other use for it? Well, Larry Ledebur, who’s professor emeritus in the Urban College, and Robi Simon, who’s a professor there, have written a really excellent book manuscript that addresses this topic. And I might even suggest that you might want to talk to these folks about this because I consider them. Well, for what it’s worth, I consider them great experts on the topic. But it’s an interesting issue. England has been dealing with this for a long time, and a lot of the literature concerning redundant churches comes from England. There are books called, for example, decay and Change, you know, the history of our churches or, you know, titled something like that. What you do with a house of worship where- [recording ends]
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