The Stained Glass Buffalo: Churches

Showing posts with label Churches. Show all posts

26 December 2007

Holy Books...

By West Coast Perspective @ buffalorising.com

A wave of churches looking for new congregations or uses is coming, primarily due to the mergers and closings under the Catholic Diocese of Buffalo’s Journey in Faith and Grace restructuring effort. Adaptive reuse of a church is expensive and difficult, though not impossible. Examples of successful transformations are available locally and worldwide. Buffalo has seen former churches turned into condos (on Richmond), manuscript museums (Porter and North), lofts (Parkside Avenue), performance spaces (Main, Delaware and Richmond), offices (Elmwood) and a community center/school (Genesee). In Amsterdam, a former church has undergone a stunning conversion to a bookstore.

Dutch architects Merkx + Girod won the 2007 Lensvelt de Architect Interior Prize for their Boekhandel Selexyz Dominicanen in Maastricht – a chain bookstore inside an 800-year old former church. Architects were challenged to respect the original use and nature of the structure while creating enough commercial space for a viable business. (more...)

Church Brew

http://www.churchbrew.com/

11 December 2007

St. Ann's...

From: Steel @ Buffalorising.com

Saint Ann's Church at Broadway and Emslie on Buffalo's East Side celebrates its 150th anniversary in August of 2008 and then it will be promptly closed down by the Catholic Diocese. "Dear patrons thank you for your patronage you can find your heritage in the trash as you leave."

This story is the second in a bittersweet series documenting my recent one-day tour through the city's ravaged East Side. St. Ann's was actually the last stop on my tour. After having attended portions of at least six Sunday masses I headed over to St. Ann's at the advice of my father. He said that the interior is not to be missed. I had actually long thought that this church was already closed down. It is in an area of the city that had experienced major demographic shifts away from a predominantly Catholic population many generations ago (as opposed to some areas of the city which have only experienced this shift within the last generation). Its windows are covered with dense yellowed fiberglass sheets for protection, which makes them appear to be boarded up. For many years I had passed this magnificent edifice wondering if anything would ever be done with it, never realizing that it was still home to.... (more).

10 December 2007

Church in Ruins

03 December 2007

Buffalo Churches...

Among many other gorgeous others...

http://www.pbase.com/kjosker/lofty_photos

27 November 2007

Buffalo Sites

Link: Buffalo as an Architectural Museum

It is Jesus

“It is Jesus that you seek when you dream of happiness; he is waiting for you when nothing else you find satisfies you; he is the beauty to which you are so attracted; it is he who provokes you with that thirst for fullness that will not let you settle for compromise; it is he who urges you to shed the masks of a false life; it is He who reads in your heart your most genuine choices, the choices that others try to stifle.

It is Jesus who stirs in you the desire to do something great with your lives, the will to follow an ideal, the refusal to allow yourselves to be ground down by mediocrity, the courage to commit yourselves humbly and patiently to improving yourselves and society, making the world more human and more fraternal.”
--Pope John Paul II

Carlo Carretto:

How much I must criticize you, my church, and yet how much I love you! You have made me suffer more than anyone and yet I owe more to you than to anyone. I should like to see you destroyed and yet I need your presence. You have given me much scandal and yet you alone have made me understand holiness. Never in this world have I seen anything more compromised, more false, yet never have I touched anything more pure, more generous or more beautiful. Countless times I have felt like slamming the door of my soul in your face - and yet, every night, I have prayed that I might die in your sure arms! No, I cannot be free of you, for I am one with you, even if not completely you. Then too - where would I go? To build another church? But I could not build one without the same defects, for they are my defects. And again, if I were to build another church, it would be my church, not Christ's church. No, I am old enough, I know better.