I found out that our place of worship was burning around 2 a.m. I woke up to seven missed calls and over 50 messages. If the texts hadn’t come with pictures of the bell tower engulfed in flames, I wouldn’t have believed them. Everyone is safe, but it’s destroyed. The fire is still going. Church is gone. For years the place had been our sanctuary, and now it was ash.
Back when we were still St. Louis kids and before we had kids of our own, my friends talked about turning the long-abandoned Catholic church into a skate park. We grew up together in a pack of feral teenagers who skated up and down Delmar Boulevard, the east-west artery that cuts through the city. We loitered outside the Shell station and Racanelli’s Pizza and Vintage Vinyl. We sat in piles of wrists and legs and hormones to claim our space on the concrete. They called us the Loop Rats, just a bunch of dirty pests the store owners had to shoo away from their doors.
Like a lot of young people who grow up in uncool places, I thought I had to get to a shiny metropolis to build success. For over a decade, I chased achievement elsewhere: New York City, Los Angeles, Boston. But it was in returning home that I became a part of building something increasingly rare and meaningful: a community.
So for years, we hauled shovelfuls of dead pigeon carcasses out of the corners of the church to clear space for construction. We called ourselves the Dead Pigeon Club, and some people even got tattoos of them, still punk even when pushing 40. I almost had a panic attack when one very alive pigeon flew uncomfortably close to my face in the bell tower. Hundreds of local volunteers lent their skills to this project. They ran the gamut from tradespeople who spent their Sundays tuckpointing, welding and laying concrete to office workers who researched 501(c) funding and historical building grants and talked to lawyers.
Although the process of building Sk8 Liborius took over a decade, our community found national attention only this summer. Predictably, it was because something tragic happened.
Source: Chapman, R. (2023, August 17). We turned an abandoned church into a skatepark. then tragedy struck. The New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/2023/08/17/opinion/skatepark-community-stlouis-sk8-liborius.html?searchResultPosition=36
Analysis: This reminded me of the Wright Factory going up in flames earlier this year. Ryan had talked about cleaning up the factory and beginning some projects inside before the fire, but perhaps there’s opportunity even after it’s been burned to fix it over time.
