Correction:
This story has been updated to reflect when steel girders were added to the building. It’s also been updated to correct the spelling and tenure of Walter F. Tunks as the church’s rector and to clarify that he led the Oxford Group.
The owner of St. Paul’s Episcopal Church on East Market Street in Akron, propped up by steel girders following a 2018 fire, is challenging a city order to demolish the iconic stone structure.
Owner Tony Troppe last Wednesday filed an appeal of the Vacant Commercial or Industrial Buildings Board’s September order. The appeal, in Summit County’s Common Pleas Court, asks that the order to demolish the building be vacated. It also requests no further demolition orders be given.
The church, built in 1884, is considered to be one of the most significant old buildings in Akron. Designed by Jacob Snyder, it uses the Akron Plan, a style of architecture popular from the 1870s to the 1920s that facilitated Sunday School instruction by building small rooms around a semicircular main room. Girders were added in 2019, after the fire the year before.
“It’s just a local landmark that needs to be preserved,” Troppe said last week. “It’s a solid, well-positioned landmark. It tells a great story of yesteryear.”
William Clay Ford and Martha Firestone wedding took place in this Akron church
That story includes meetings hosted by Walter F. Tunks, the church’s onetime rector (1930-1953), who led the Oxford Group. These gatherings were a precursor to Alcoholics Anonymous.
They also include an event that the Akron Beacon Journal called “the biggest society wedding in Akron’s history” — the 1947 wedding of Martha Firestone, granddaughter of Harvey S. Firestone Sr., to William Clay Ford, grandson of the late Henry Ford.
Troppe said his vision for the property is a living laboratory tied in to the city’s Polymer Industry Cluster, “a place where people can be inspired and inspire others.” He said he envisions the church as an entry portal to Akron’s academic and biomedical corridor and wants it to be a space focused on advanced materials and sustainable practices.
Troppe said his vision comes from Lewis Miller, the inventor of the Akron Plan, who also founded the Buckeye Mower and Reaper Co. There, Miller invented the Buckeye Mower, a prototype of the modern version. Inventing the mower, Troppe said, marked Miller’s rebellion against slavery; he wanted the church to inspire people to “continue to see the light.”
“Once you chop down the tree, it can no longer provide the shade for those who sought shelter under it,” Troppe said.
‘You can’t save every building’
Not all think it’s worth saving the church at 354 E. Market St.
At the Sept. 10 meeting where its demolition was ordered, the board said the “property, construction, unprotected exposure, or lack of maintenance, presents a hazard to the health, safety, general welfare, or morals of occupants, neighboring properties, or the public.”
Dave Lieberth, the president of the Akron History Center, said he admired Troppe’s ideas for the property, but ideas aren’t enough.
“They are useless without a tenant,” Lieberth said. “Someone has to want to occupy it. Without it, buildings can’t continue to exist.”
Lieberth called the burned-out church an albatross, saying the girders and the fallen roof might mean that the best solution is to preserve its memories through photos.
“You can’t save every building,” he said. “At the end of the day, it’s an eyesore.”
Akron church needs time and money to survive
Bruce Taylor, who lives across the street from the church, said tearing the building down would do no favors to the city or its image.
Taylor questioned whether the building is truly unsafe, saying there are no falling bricks, as there were at an apartment building earlier this year that was ordered to be demolished. And he said the board did not require a structural engineer to examine the building before deciding it was a hazard.
Taylor said it’s part of a cluster of buildings that represent Akron’s pre-rubber history, an era that can’t be reconstructed once it’s been destroyed, he said.
“If it’s a safety issue, it can be rectified by means other than tearing the building down,” said Taylor, a Signal Akron Documenter whose home was built in 1884 as well. “They need to allow Troppe and his supporters time to put a financing plan together.”
That’s what Troppe said he wants: “It needs work and it needs time and it needs money.”
Insisting on a specific timeline, Taylor said, is a guarantee that nothing will happen.
Besides, he said, is it so bad to have a building that’s a ruin? Cities across Europe have ruins that people flock to.
“The alternative is a vacant lot,” he said. “That does no favor to the city or to the city’s image.”
Akron sees building as a nuisance
Minutes from the September meeting show John York, from Akron’s law department, asked Troppe how long he would have the city wait for something to happen. York added that he thought the building presented a further fire risk and that the city saw it as a public safety issue and a nuisance.
Scott Rowland, the chair of the board, did not respond to a request for comment sent through the city.
Dana Noel, the advocacy chair of Progress Through Preservation, said he thought Troppe had done everything the board had requested at a previous meeting this summer.
The board, he said, didn’t seem to have any hesitancy about approving the demolition, a decision he called disappointing.
“Where’s the vision from the city? Isn’t there any creativity?” he asked. “The city just wants to tear it down. What are they going to put there, another fast food chain or gas station?”
This story has been updated.