The New York Times - USA (2020-10-26)

(Antfer) #1
A8 N THE NEW YORK TIMES, MONDAY, OCTOBER 26, 2020

Tracking an OutbreakThe New Reality


Café Appalachia
SOUTH CHARLESTON, W.VA.

AT CAFÉ APPALACHIA,a restaurant in what used
to be St. John United Methodist Church, good
morning is not just good manners.
“When you walk in the door, someone had
better say: ‘Hey, I see you,’ ” said Cheryl Laws, the
founder and chief executive of Pollen8, the non-
profit group that owns the cafe. “That’s what we
do around here.”
Before the pandemic, diners came together
under the vaulted wood ceiling and stained-glass
windows to reflect over Appalachian comfort food.
Now, they talk about the coronavirus, too.
“There’s sadness when a worshiping space
changes, but this is a whole different kind of sanc-
tuary,” said the Rev. Cindy Briggs-Biondi, the
former pastor at St. Paul United Methodist
Church, which owns the building.
Café Appalachia, which opened in July 2018,
also provides employment training for women in
recovery from the opioid crisis, which has left
West Virginia with one of the highest rates of
death from overdose and touched nearly every-
one.
“If Jesus were here now?” said Ronnie Skeens,
a regular. “The way my faith works? He’d be back
there cooking with them.”

Esplanade Studios
NEW ORLEANS

IN LATE AUGUST 2005,as Hurricane Katrina took
aim at New Orleans, the congregation of the Third
Presbyterian Church in the Treme neighborhood
gathered to pray. They did not know it would be
the last time together under their shared roof.
Hours later, the sky cracked open. First came
the winds, slicing through walls gnawed hollow by
decades of termites. Then came the rains, dump-
ing water into the basement and seeping into the
spines of prayer books. The gothic revival building
that had stood tall since the 1920s — first as home
to a Presbyterian congregation, then to Baptists —
sank to its knees.
Eight years after Hurricane Katrina, Misha
Kachkachishvili opened Esplanade Studios in the
space. He had established himself as an audio
engineer working with local artists and bought the
former church to court the composers working
with the movie industry. Since then, Willie Nelson,
Janelle Monáe and Eric Clapton have been among
the dozens of artists who have recorded there.
The sheer size of the building — 14,000 square
feet, 30-foot ceilings, four studios — has kept it up
and running through the pandemic. Local jazz
groups and the Louisiana Philharmonic stream
concerts, safe at a social distance.
“I am not a religious person at all,” Mr.
Kachkachishvili said. “But sometimes, you get
goose bump moments, and sometimes you want to
pinch yourself. It’s very spiritual.”

The Internet Archive
SAN FRANCISCO

ONCE, IN THE AGE OF PAPYRUS,hundreds of
years before the birth of Jesus Christ, the seat of
the world’s knowledge was at the mouth of the Nile
in the Library of Alexandria. But a fire, started by
Julius Caesar, incinerated much of the most expan-
sive collection of human knowledge at the time.
Today, people carry human history around in
their pockets, unlocked with a few taps and a scroll.
But digital accounts are vulnerable. Servers crash.
Web pages disappear. So Brewster Kahle, who
struck it rich in the early dot-com age, founded the
Internet Archive in 1996 to safeguard digital output
for posterity. His idea was simple: “We’re going to
build a library of everything ever published and
make it freely available to everyone in the world.”
In 2009, more than a decade after he founded the
archive, Mr. Kahle bought a Christian Science
church, built in 1923, to house his operation. The
shrinking congregation sold the building for $4.
million and moved out, making way for servers and
coders.
In the former nave — now called “the great
room” — pillows made from early internet-era
T-shirts adorn the pews. Servers blink in the center.
They are the physical home of the Wayback Ma-
chine, which lets users time-travel through the web.
In a way, in the archive, one can see the internet.
Like a church, it is the abstract brought down to
earth.

The Church Nightclub
DENVER

REGAS CHRISTOUis a direct man. When he
opened a club in a former church over two dec-
ades ago, he named it the way he saw it. The
Church heaved and jived for almost 30 years.
In March, when the pandemic struck, Mr.
Christou shut it down. The lights stilled. The bar
emptied. The electronic dance music stopped.
“We have no choice,” he said. “It’s a nightclub.
We can’t turn it into an office building.”
Before the pandemic, the regal space, previ-
ously an Episcopal church founded in 1889, was
full of dancers in a dizzy haze moving to a crush-
ing techno beat. Now, it is quiet and still awaiting
its rebirth.
At another of his clubs, Mr. Christou has turned
the parking lot into a gallery for patrons to look at
work by local artists. At the Church, he hopes to
stream live D.J. sets outdoors so the club can
keep spreading its groove.
“The hardest part about the Church was not to
create something new,” he said. “The hardest part
was to preserve what was old, and to respect it.”

NEW SPIRITS RISE IN OLD,


THE PANDEMIChas thrown religious worship
into turmoil. Some congregations spent months
meeting over Zoom, uncertain if in-person worship
could be safe. Others struggled to keep the doors
open as contributions declined. A few have closed
their doors.
But even before the coronavirus hit, many of
the same issues were afflicting religious institu-
tions; the most faithful worshipers have aged, and
church attendance has fallen in recent decades.
Often, congregations have sold their buildings to
eager developers, who might tear them down or
partition the cavernous spaces into expensive
condos.
But not all flock-less churches face an afterlife
as living spaces stuffed full of “exceptional quirks

Article by AMELIA NIERENBERG
Photographs by TRISTAN SPINSKI

.
Free download pdf