Serendipitous conservation: faith-to-faith conversion of historic churches in Buffalo

ABSTRACT

US cities with shrinking populations have faced tremendous challenges in conserving their built heritage. Often, conservation work involves adaptively reusing existing buildings. Most reuse activity is fuelled by the developer and market-driven rehabilitation of historic properties through tax credits and other incentives. Places of worship like churches, however, are difficult to rehabilitate, and cities lose this urban heritage after years of vacancy and neglect, and eventual demolition. In many shrinking cities, particularly those now welcoming new immigrants and refugees, serendipitous conservation of vacant churches through faith-to-faith conversion can be an asset to local planners and preservationists in their fight to save urban heritage from demolition. This paper examines two former Roman Catholic Churches in the City of Buffalo: one converted into an Islamic mosque, and another into a Buddhist temple, to argue that faith-to-faith conversions can be a viable tool for other US cities experiencing similar threats to their urban heritage.