Owl among the ruins

Fifty years ago on Thanksgiving Day, a group of friends shared a festive meal in a former Episcopal church in Great Barrington, Massachusetts. First constructed in 1829 as St. James Chapel, then enlarged and renamed as Trinity Church in 1866, the white wooden structure, with pointed Gothic windows, steeply pitched roof and tall attached tower displays the Platonic ideal of a New England church, the transcendent anchor of so many Northeastern towns. But its congregation had dwindled over the years. In 1964 it was deconsecrated and sold to Alice and Ray Brock, who put a bedroom in the tower and made it their home.

As Arlo Guthrie tells it in his song “Alice’s Restaurant” the new owners had “a lot of room downstairs where the pews used to be. Havin’ all that room, seein’ as how they took out all the pews, they decided that they didn’t have to take out their garbage for a long time.” So after dinner, Arlo and friends offered to take all that garbage to the dump in their VW bus. But when they found the dump closed for Thanksgiving, they improvised, emptying their load onto an unofficial garbage pile spotted on a side road. Guthrie was arrested for littering, an offense which would eventually make him “unfit” for the draft. Absurd but true, and Guthrie’s 18-minute song about it became a uniquely comic anthem of the antiwar movement. Many of us would sing its joyful chorus as we marched on the Pentagon in November 1967.

I thought about Alice and Arlo and old Trinity Church when I read an article by Inga Saffron about the fate of struggling churches in Philadelphia, “In the rush to build houses, churches are being discarded.” Her subject was St. Laurentius, an historic Gothic Revival church built in 1882 with the nickels and dimes of Polish immigrants. A prominent symbol of the city’s Polish heritage, but no longer a viable parish, it was slated for demolition by the Roman Catholic archdiocese. The property would be sold to housing developers.