I’ve been living in my current apartment for almost ten months, but only recently did I learn that the monstrous church kitty-corner to my front stoop is abandoned. I know what you’re thinking, and I agree: I, too, had no idea I was this interesting.
I want to tell people about this but I have a very real problem: there’s no clear way of describing the scene without undercutting the drama, because there’s no way to accurately describe the church’s location in relation to my front door besides the word ‘kitty-corner.’
Nothing sounds ominous, or even vaguely threatening, if you describe it as kitty-corner to you. Nothing!
“Help! I’m being pursued by a brigade of machete-swinging Neo Nazis! Help! They have me kitty-cornered!”
Or…
“She awoke with a start in the pale and unsure hours of early morning, and in through her dulling dreams she saw it, and she felt a whitehot fright. It had found her in her own home–the gruesome specter that she’d only glimpsed in mirrors and shadows, that had plagued her periphery for days–it was here, watching her sleep with hungry eyes, perched upon the chair that kitty-cornered her bed.”
See? A horrible word. Just so boisterously one-note. I’m not sure I’ll ever have a use for it…unless it’s going to be the name of a cat-themed crafting boutique, which is really any crafting boutique north of the Mason Dixon line.
Anyways, I live on the opposite corner of this church, and I walk past it all the time. The whole thing is hewn from a stormy gray stone and sparsely adorned, so I’m guessing it isn’t Catholic. Huge stained glass windows have been blacked out from the inside and the fringing gardens are scraggly and unkempt. There’s a bordering wrought iron gate that I can only describe as nervous, perhaps because it looks like it was built to keep the decay of the church trapped inside instead of keeping wayward youths out.
But this week, walking past the church, I noticed something amiss. It was a rainy night and I was on my way home after a night of eating sushi and watching Battlestar Galactica and, to be candid, I was a little drunk. As I rounded the corner and skirted around puddles, I heard a sound through the rainfall that stopped me short. It was a clunking noise, deadened barely by the copse of sickly greenery between myself and the church. Turning, I saw that the fence penning in the church had, in a length of ten feet besides me, been forced over, leading down a pair of rotting steps and into a narrow maze flanking the church’s basement level.
Someone was down there. Or several someones. And maybe it was the Battlestar Galactica, or maybe my inebriation, but I was feeling investigative, and so I brought myself right to the forced fence stepped down two steps. I wondered: who would break into an abandoned, gothic church in the middle of the less-nice side of Boston’s South End? And for what?
The answer came readily. The gays. And to gentrify.
I could just hear the clicks of their distressed leather booties clomping through the church’s abandoned bowels. I could just hear their nasal scrutiny whining through the boarded windows.
“This sanctuary? This will have to be torn out. But we can keep the tabernacle. It’s very Versace. And that organ? Does it still work? Can we make it spew bubbles? If we can use the original piping and have it spew bubbles, we can keep it. Otherwise, I’ll bring in my own.”
“Oh, I love that Virgin Mary statue! Wouldn’t it be fun to prop her up near the front door to take people’s coats? We could dress her up for holidays, and all in black for Easter because, you know, she wouldn’t have been festive for that occasion, I don’t think. And we can give her a sign that says, “Abstinence is NOT 100% Effective!!!!” when Jehovah’s Witnesses come by! Wouldn’t that be fun?”
“Do they make stained glass windows in pastel? Do Catholics only have the basic color wheel? Because this palette is very Underbudget-Third-Grade-Art-Class.”
“It’s a shame this isn’t a Greek Orthodox church. Everything would already be gilded. And they always have the tackiest chandeliers. Somehow I had gotten it into my head that there’d be a chandelier, and we could rig it to re-enact Phantom of the Opera.”
“Would it be bad to re-purpose this baptism bowl as a bidet? Wouldn’t that be so edgy? I think that’s edgy.”
“Hey Jesus! How’s it hangin’?”
It wasn’t fear or nervousness that I felt when I realized someone might be breaking into the church. It was unfettered jealousy. Jealousy, because they’d beaten me to it. And in my imagining of who it might be or what they might be doing, I’d unwittingly revealed to myself how badly I wanted to derelict church for my very own. Burning with envy, I stepped back onto the sidewalk and whisked myself up the rest of the block, writing this post in my head.
And now, every time I stroll past, I wonder what I would do if I had an entire church to renovate. I think about what I’d keep, what I’d trash, and what I’d pile onto Michelle Bachmann’s lawn in the middle of the night. And what would I do with the space? Would I re-purpose the vaulted heights into the clandestine condo of my dreams? Or would I use it as a derelict fortress to re-enact the second X-Men movie?
Or would I open up a cat-themed crafting boutique called ‘The Kitty-Corner Crafting Boutique and Pet-Hotel’?
Really, who am I kidding? We are north of the Mason Dixon line.
Dear Ryan,
I adore you, your wit, creativity, zest for life, and your writing. My first church job, after moving to NYC, was in a small Episcopalian church called Church of the Holy Communion. We singers gleefully called it Church of the Holy Commotion. I moved on to other singing gigs in the city, and certain that my departure was ice sole cause of the demise of the church. A couple of years after that, The Church of The Holy Commotion became a discotheque. Imagine the renovation!!
Mizz Myrna! You are a dream and this comment is my dream come true! I hope you got a healthy cut of the royalties that the discotheque made…obviously your departure spurred the decline into sin.