Much of Wellfleet turned out on May 14th for the kickoff of Preservation Hall on Main Street. The whole opening week of free concerts and other pleasures it was the place to be, to witness, to celebrate and feel like part of this history being made. A Wellfleet love-in at its most intense.
The Washashore Invasion of the 1970s has established many beachheads on this sandy shore, but none more impressive than Prez Hall, as it has come fondly to be known.
A big part of the story is that Prez Hall represents the secularization of a former Catholic church, Our Lady of Lourdes, a Main Street fixture since 1912. The town bought it in 2001 when church powers decided it was no longer viable as a church. Even without its original purpose, it seemed too important a part of downtown to let it go to the highest bidder. But now that we had a defrocked church on our hands, what should we do with it? For some years, we couldn’t agree. Inspiration was lacking. The building just sat there– decaying, soulless.
And then a group of citizens formed a non-profit with a vision of this familiar part of downtown as a community cultural center, a hall to nurture and preserve the spirit of this town. A Preservation Hall. (The name was borrowed from the New Orleans jazz scene). The new vision would require extensive remodelling. There ensued several years of creative fundraising including such events as an auctioning of artful birdhouses constructed by our talented citizens.
Contributions big and small have come from a large percentage of citizens, amounting to date to 2.4 million, of the total cost of around 3 million, with splendid results: the preservation of existing features such as stained glass, the restoration of the distinctive carved doors, the addition of updated amenities. The church-like cupola is now topped with a sculpture of a heron, symbol of another kind of spirit.
Certain buildings and institutions—colleges and churches among them– seem fixtures in our lives. We expect them to be there forever. How must it feel (as happened to my sister) to return to your college alma mater and find that it has gone out of business?
I have wondered how friends who were married in Our Lady of Lourdes decades ago have felt walking by the place that blessed their union now abandoned by the spirit that did the blessing.
There was worry, when the Catholics left, that the building could have fallen into the wrong hands, been torn down, or taken over by fast food joint. (Church of Ronald McDonald?) It happened to St.John the Baptist in Pittsburgh. I imagine it could be upsetting for former parishioners to discover that their former church has been turned into Church Brew Works.
Prez Hall feels different. “ Secularization” sells it short. The de-consecration of the church as such took place several years ago. The spirit, the churchiness of it, flew the coop and landed a couple of miles away in a new building built fresh for the purpose on Rt 6. But rather than secularization, call the new incarnation a re-consecration. The old spirit, one sort of spirit, gone but replaced with a new spirit. New wine in an old (but wonderfully remodeled) bottle.
And not after all an entirely different sort of spirit. There were already by the opening at least seven weddings planned for coming weeks in the newly reconstituted venue.
Prez Hall is just getting started but with the energetic and very successful community-wide fundraising (ongoing) it has considerable momentum already. And it starts with a wonderful sense of its place in our town’s history.
Opening week ended with Prez Hall Follies, a cabaret of local talent with just the right mix of self-roast and self-love. In the audience was the three- year- old granddaughter of one of the original visionaries of the hall. The last act of the night was an actress playing that little girl at age 103, at the centennial of the Hall, conveying a sense of how this beginning will look 100 years from now.
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