On the left, you can see the steeple of the Catholic church that was sold to a developer and turned into low-income housing, and on the right, a church that recently lost its steeple - both, in their ways, illustrating the changing fortunes of churches in Philadelphia and in the country. I posted pictures of both churches last fall, seen from street level.
I've been thinking about steeples. Wikipedia has a very brief entry on them, in which I learned that their problems include, not surprisingly, pigeons: "Steeples often become havens for pigeons and their feces and rotting corpses damage and eventually compromise structure as they retain moisture and are acidic."
Yuck. I knew that steeples are endangered. Throughout the country they are decaying and being torn down, and local congregations can often no longer afford to preserve these picturesque but dangerous and expensive ornamental structures.
An article in The New York Times outlines the problems and headaches of church steeples.
"Deferred maintenance is a huge problem for congregations," said Jeffrey Gonyeau of Historic Boston, a preservation group that runs the Steeples Project, which works to maintain Boston's historic houses of worship. "It seems like there's never enough time or money to devote to maintaining these."
I don't think the church on the right in the picture above will be able to replace their steeple, which was most likely removed because it was a hazard. The steeples of America are disappearing -- not a huge tragedy in and of itself, but certainly a part of the landscape (both rural and urban) that we may miss some day.
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