I’m an unabashed historic preservationist, so it gladdened my heart to see that one of Lewiston’s most historic buildings, St. Joseph’s Church, located at 251-253 Main St., may have just gotten a new lease on life.
In February, Democracy Brewing Company announced it had obtained an option on the property and was planning to redevelop it as a brewpub and restaurant. It’s certainly not the use the church fathers originally had in mind for the structure, but historic preservation is all about repurposing buildings no longer needed or fit for their original use.
Rearview Mirror
St. Joseph’s had been a whisker away from demolition in 2013. Closed by the Catholic diocese in 2009 due to shrinking attendance and rising costs, it sat empty for three years before it was acquired by Central Maine Healthcare, the parent organization of Central Maine Medical Center. CMH promptly announced its intention to level the structure and use the site as a parking lot. The announcement caused Maine Preservation to place St. Joseph’s on its “most endangered” list.
CMH had plenty of building space but not enough parking area, and the church needed extensive repairs. So demolition, as a business decision, seemed a no-brainer. But CMH hadn’t taken into consideration the community’s reaction to the threatened loss of an irreplaceable historic treasure.
The former St. Joseph’s Catholic Church on Main Street in Lewiston is being considered for redevelopment as a brew pub and restaurant. Russ Dillingham/Sun Journal
Completed in 1867, St. Joseph’s was Lewiston’s first Roman Catholic church and was closely associated with the influx of Irish and French-Canadian immigrants into this area beginning in the mid-19th century. With its soaring Gothic Revival façade and beautiful stained-glass windows, it was an architectural gem. More importantly, it was a landmark of religious tolerance.
The Franklin Company — a Boston-based real estate, water-power, and manufacturing concern which acquired and developed much of Lewiston’s riverfront and downtown starting in the late 1840s — owned a prime building site at the corner of Bates and Main streets. Irish Catholic immigrants formed a big part of the workforce which dug the canals and labored in textile mills owned or controlled by the Franklin Company. They wanted to erect a church on the lot. Yet, out of bigotry, the company’s Yankee Protestant directors stubbornly refused to sell.
Albert Kelsey, the company’s local director, was sympathetic to the immigrants’ desire for a church of their own, so he hoodwinked Franklin’s board into selling by slipping a deed for the property into a bunch of routine papers for the directors’ signatures. The deed was signed and the land duly transferred. It became the site of St. Joseph’s.
When CMH announced it was demolishing the church in 2013, its spokesman rather disingenuously claimed the health care group intended to be respectful of the building’s history. How? Probably by installing a commemorative marker on the site, the spokesman explained.
On Feb. 2, 2013, I wrote a column in this newspaper criticizing CMH’s plan, arguing that St. Joseph’s was a unique and irreplaceable part of the city’s history and social fabric and that demolition was hardly a way to respect that history. Reaction to the column was positive. One email I received was from an activist who headed a group seeking to protect historic churches from destruction. She rallied public support to save the building.
CMH, recognizing a public relations disaster in the making, announced in August 2013 that it would leave the building standing and seek other uses for it, demolishing only the adjacent rectory for parking. The health care organization, which had financial problems of its own, never did find an alternative use. But it put the property back on the market in 2017, leading to the eventual emergence of Democracy Brewing Company.
Democracy Brewing Company’s reasons for choosing Lewiston as its second location (the first being Boston) are instructive. According to a Feb. 16 Sun Journal article, CEO James Razsa said he was attracted to the building because it fit the brewery’s vision of recreating a traditional “public house.” He added, “The church is kind of uniquely beautiful and old-world in that sense that fits really well with our brand too.”
Bingo! History is a powerful way for businesses to “brand” their products or services. Where there’s historical context, brand identification doesn’t have to be created in a vacuum through adoption of clever logos or slogans promoted by big-budget marketing and advertising. It just has to tap into that deep well of shared identity already embedded in cherished memories of an historic past.
The most visible surviving reminders of Lewiston’s past are massive mill complexes lining the Androscoggin River and the canal network fed by it, as well as the churches, mansions, commercial blocks and tenements of the 1800s and early 1900s. These create a striking cityscape matched by few New England communities.
We’ve lost a number of prominent historic landmarks to demolition or arson since I moved here over four decades ago — including the Libbey and Cowan mills, Empire Theater, United Baptist Church, Bergin Block, Bates Mill superintendent’s office, and three adjacent Lisbon Street commercial buildings now occupied by the Marsden Hartley apartment block.
But miraculously a lot more have been (or are in the process of being) saved and redeveloped, including Bates Mill, Continental Mill, St. Mary’s Church, St. Patrick’s Church, Dominican Block, Peck’s department store, Lyceum Hall, Music Hall, Lewiston Public Library, Grand Trunk Railroad station and Maine Central Railroad station.
So let’s tip our hat and hoist a glass to Democracy Brewing Company. May it, like the building it plans to occupy, become a beloved local landmark for many years to come!
Elliott Epstein is a trial lawyer with Andrucki & King in Lewiston. His Rearview Mirror column, which has appeared in the Sun Journal for 16 years, analyzes current events in an historical context. He is also the author of “Lucifer’s Child,” a book about the notorious 1984 child murder of Angela Palmer. He may be contacted at epsteinel@yahoo.com
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