On a site visit in unincorporated LA three weeks ago, biking west off the Watts Tower blue line station just north of the Harbor Freeway interchange, I take note of church facades scattered in the residential fabric. Pausing to document these anomalies is compulsory for me at this point. I’m using the word ‘anomaly’ here to refer to something that is assuredly slated for change—possibly, the property has already changed hands even though the occupants intend to stay on, or a developer has put out a predatory deal to longtime landowners who lack the knowledge to refuse or negotiate the offer, or new inhabitants of the neighborhood have pushed plans for construction that are already underway unbeknownst to their neighbors. By these terms, any visible constructed thing in the contemporary city could be noteworthy.
The first time I took particular note of residential-scale church facades, I was wandering Tremé and the Lower Ninth, walking around New Orleans in october 2019. Pastel tone stucco or painted wood siding paired with stained glass windows, religious iconography and ornamentation, caught my eye all over the city. Seamlessly interspersed among single family homes, the single-story facades were idiosyncratic in their individuated expression, yet spatially coherent with the residential fabric, whether or not they housed active congregations.
By contrast, the temporariness of tent structures and ad-hoc occupation of parking lots for congregational use unequivocally indicated the presence of active churches. Services were announced by signage on vacant lots and accommodated by makeshift canopies over folding chairs. Juxtaposed with the impermanence of an absent building, the community permanence was stark. Physical place mattered less than the presence of congregants themselves.
Provisional use presents a different type of visibility than constructed permanence. “The pleasure of misuse!” I yell out to EL recently, biking across a bridge designed for vehicular use during a critical mass takeover through downtown on a summer night. Informality and mobility in the form of food carts and street vending, tents and pickup trucks popping up regular sidewalk sales, a roadside congregation, taco stands, busking and other forms of guerrilla performance, indicate that a neighborhood has eyes on the street, a sustained practice of street interaction. Rather than the oversight of police or city workers, it is the oversight of local community members themselves that reigns.
A congregational elder at this site in unincorporated LA tells me that prior to lockdown, the majority of their church had been commuters coming from as far as Gardena, Inglewood, Riverside. Since sermons shifted to zoom, the church has focused their efforts on direct services run out of the church parking lot, including free covid testing and a food distro. These days a majority of congregants are local neighbors, including unhoused folks familiar with the church’s programming schedule. Previously, the building was regularly tagged and vandalized. This hasn’t happened in years. Now, neighbors call whenever USPS drops a package over the fence, offering help unbidden.
A stretch of my neighborhood in northeast LA has been heightening my compulsion to document, to record. The trees along the avenue have been pruned back, foliage widening to accommodate phone lines and electrical cables, resulting in squat, low-slung geometries that contrast against a flickering monotony of single family homes with their stucco facades and low iron fences. Mattresses are set out at the curb and motley assortments of wooden furniture adorn the sidewalks, where older latino men have a smoke and a chat with auto workers on break at the tire shop across the street or aunties wheeling wire carts of produce back from the corner market.
The casual ease of familiar and unprompted gathering has a cadence that rhymes with the time of day that the fruit seller promenades his cart past, or that the mutual aid food distro down the street starts unloading and organizing cardboard boxes of produce in front of a small duplex, a private home situated between the salvadoran restaurant and the liquor store, next to the community center, next to the Dollar Tree. The rhythms of public congregation slot into the individuated tracks of folks going about their day-to-day business.
The regularity strikes me as fleeting, my impulse to photograph and notetake provoked by the sense that I’m repeatedly bearing witness to rapid change, imminent shifts in the cultural fabric of the neighborhood. Previously, the only mixed use building typologies of the neighborhood had been a corner market, a public library, a community center, factories fragrant throughout the day baking bread for distribution across the city, a local cobbler, a barbershop, a bird seller, a church, several liquor stores, and the Dollar Tree. The newcomers —an upscale coffee shop that primarily attracts goth asians with dyed hair, expensive sneakers, expensive bags, and expensive small dogs, a bagel shop, a tattoo parlor, a portuguese wine bar frequented seemingly by folks driving in from other LA neighborhoods, a boutique grocery, a window for pizza by the slice— are interspersed into that existing fabric.
Having lived in the neighborhood only one year renders me ill-equipped to root into the specificity of these changes. The binary split between what came before and what came after is a moving target, continually reconceived at any given moment. Only the pattern is readily recognizable to me. As a place is paved over with pervasive sameness and the bland, flat aesthetic that intrudes on an existing neighborhood to appeal to wealthier and whiter newcomers at the expense of longtime residents, public space is increasingly policed and surveilled, access increasingly predicated on paying for goods and services, on the transaction time in a restaurant or store. Erasure is integral to development, building out the contemporary city is predicated on settler colonial conquest and displacement, often masquerading under the words ‘revitalize,’ ‘renewal,’ or ‘improvement.’
My neighbor in 2020 West Philly, an older black man and his nephew who would hang out on their porch with the cat, used to tell me they were glad for the proposals to develop student housing —which a friend, another decades-long neighborhood resident, had been protesting— citing increased safety, more families and kids on the street, less gang violence or drug trafficking, should the plans be approved. But subsequent increased value of real estate in the neighborhood would inevitably push out longtime residents and benefit the universities already encroaching on the neighborhood of Mantua.
Disinvestment from the city has meant that, for years, the most abundant resourcing of the neighborhood has been provided by the residents themselves for the residents themselves. Honeysuckle Provisions, a grocery and community space run by artist and chef Omar Tate and Cybille St.Aude-Tate, is “a network of community spaces centered around the values of ancestry, nourishment, and reclamation” with “Black and Afrocentric ideology at the center.” Tate’s garden plots in the city proper sit right under the elevated SEPTA line, a short bike ride southwest of Mantua.
Hilda Solis’s program for supplying corner markets with fresh produce in Los Angeles seeks to serve a similar need, combatting food apartheid through civic investment. These corner markets primarily serve longtime residents, folks who have been in the neighborhood for generations, but there is also me, joking with Miguel at the counter. I ask sometimes what he thinks, or chat with Arturo, the local cobbler, their small shops situated between a smattering of new businesses to the north —the portuguese spot, pizza joint, coffee shop, and hair salon— whose price point is clearly prohibitive in a neighborhood where, to the south, a local pupuseria dishes up refried beans, platanos fritos, pupusas con queso y frijoles, a generous amount of curtido, full meals for fewer than $6, to the pairs of men in hard hats who regularly get dropped off by their friends in pickup trucks to walk across the street and grab lunch midday.
The presence of residential-scale church buildings in unincorporated south LA or New Orleans, Lincoln Heights and Cypress Park and Chinatown, can’t be cleanly correlated with any one stage of displacement or development. Anecdotally, vacant lots, community gardens, accessible public spaces, anomalous disused space like small and underpopulated church buildings, often persist in areas underserved by transit, proximate to pollution and other environmental and health hazards, with multiple liquor stores per block and fast food stalls.
“Vicious cycles of disinvestment” in historically redlined areas contrast sharply with “real estate investment and an influx of higher-income residents” that produce “improved amenities and resources (that) cater to newcomers and displacement pressures on longterm residents,” according to the Urban Displacement Project and their body of research sited in San Francisco. “Today’s gentrifying low-income neighborhoods are predominantly the same neighborhoods that were redlined and denied home ownership loans in the 1930s.” The same is true across much of LA county, where developer predation tend to center squarely on historically disadvantaged neighborhoods.
Congregational elders at a church situated between Leimert Park and Crenshaw are quick to afford nuance and generosity to the concept of ‘gentrification.’ “We don’t mind it, I don’t see it as a problem, I see it as a bonus. It’s always been this way. Bring it on.” The inevitability of human movement is conflated somewhat with the shifting resources and access that follows these changes. But, the pastor clarifies, he meets newcomers to the neighborhood largely through the church’s food giveaway program. “They want to be part of a community that’s welcoming and loving. And that’s what we want.”
“The young people, they’re involved with the museum across the street,” and, “the new coffeeshops that we’re seeing on Jefferson Boulevard... That’s something we haven’t seen here before. But it’s still building a sense of community,” says an elder who grew in the neighborhood. The pastor recalls how the park was a site of crime and drug trafficking. “The park is organized now; there’s a neighborhood group that meets every week in the park. Sitting in the park with them, you can point, ‘that’s my church,’ and I always invite folks to come.”
“I really like the idea of people just staying here,” someone else says of the disused space at the church, too large for their current congregation, “having a little fellowship over coffee, instead of just driving by.” Fewer US adults participate in any form of organized religion every year. “Membership in houses of worship” has continued to decline. “In 2020, 47% of americans said they belonged to a church, synagogue, or mosque, down from 50% in 2018 and 70% in 1999.”1 Many churches, temples, mosques, or synagogues are vestiges of community care that were relevant in a different time for resource sharing and community gathering.
Congregational elders I’ve met from various parts of unincorporated Los Angeles, northeast LA, Baldwin Park, Lancaster, South LA, Pasadena, Inglewood, Compton, have expressed to me a clear-eyed understanding that their programming is fading into irrelevance. Possible futures for these congregations require a turn back outwards to be community-facing, through food distribution, affordable housing, reentry services, job training, financial literacy classes, LGBTQIA youth group programs, support to families separated by the child welfare system, mental health assistance, music classes, among other amenities specifically targeting the needs of the local community.
In one story from December 2022 Knoxville, Tennessee, a pastor left three decades of work in black baptist churches to start a community garden, organizing a ‘congregation’ to grow vegetables and sell at a farmers market, and collect unsold produce from around the city to deliver weekly to people in public housing. In the words of one young congregation member,
“I want time to sit down, like we do on Sundays sometimes or around the fire, and, like, pray and re-center and figure out what we’re about in the world. Because the world is very noisy. And then I want a church to get shit done with your community and for your community.”
The pastor notes that without the connotations and preconceptions attached to the traditional church, there is more opportunity for real connection with congregants. Gardening and providing food for local community offers more common ground.
In his 2016 book Dark Space, Mario Gooden illustrates a spatial case study of the church as community infrastructure. Gooden’s book details the work of black american designers and the continuing impact of those designs on both architecture and everyday life.2 In one passage, Gooden describes the work of austrian-born US architect Rudolph Schindler, a white man who in 1944 was hired to design the Bethlehem Baptist church. Gooden describes Schindler as
“keenly aware of the importance of social life, the sense of refuge in the black church, and that despite the promises of the Southern California dream there existed certain places where blacks were not welcomed. Restrictive covenants were frequently used by real estate developers and planning boards to keep blacks out or run the risk of violent real estate conflicts.”
Citing a need for “security,” Schindler makes the case for an outdoor patio surrounded by the wings of the building itself, split to encompass and protect a space where folks could safely congregate without being harassed by police or non-black neighbors. Per Gooden’s analysis, Schindler
“transforms the hegemony of theological space that had been handed down from white missionaries to slaves in the eighteenth century into a liberative space that switches between individual subjectivity and community identity, and anticipates the relationship between liberation and what would be called “black theology” nearly thirty years later.”
Since gradeschool —when I’d get into fights with friends who played violin with me in the orchestra, friends raised jehovah’s witness— my understanding of organized religion has principally been as a violent body, both at the level of the institution (genocidal, colonizing) and at the level of the individual (proselytizing, manipulative). I saw christianity only as a mechanism for perpetuating “structural violence against subordinated groups,”3 against LGBTQIA folks and other sexual, gender, or racial minorities. At the time, I couldn’t articulate that it was the erasure of entire cultures and people, the destruction of indigenous american life through spanish missions, the historical atrocities that any one religious group is always committing against another group of people, that foregrounded my perception of organized religion.
But I was obsessed with monks, nuns, and their respective lifestyles. (Famously, on a minivan road trip at age nine, I scream-announced to my entire family that I could see nuns out the hotel window.) I loved the idea of indulging in the practice of reading and writing all day uninterrupted —irrespective of the subject matter at hand, since at the time I had little patience for spiritual self-inquiry— I loved that belgian monks made beer and that buddhist monks were also vegetarian, I loved their illuminated manuscripts, which my mom had once taken me to see at a Getty art exhibit, knowing that the tiny, precise, almost-illegible-to-the-human-eye drawings would pique my interest. And of course Winona’s character in the 1990 film Mermaids was obsessed with nuns, and so was I!
Despite a superficial fascination with religious devotion, I’d never conceived of the possibility of the church as refuge or sanctuary, let alone space of liberation, until I moved to New Jersey in 2017, the same year that I read Gooden’s book. I rented a 9’ x 10’ room for 3 years —at 30, this is still the longest I have lived any one place in my adult life— in a duplex owned by the First Baptist Church in Princeton, a black congregation in the Witherspoon Jackson historic district.
Most of my neighbors on that block were members of the congregation. Charles, always on the front porch with his big yellow labrador, held annual cookouts in the long green that stretched out behind our houses, connecting five or six duplex yards in one long, continuous, shared open space. Charles’s son was running for a position in the local school district, my landlord was a city councilperson, and I would hear preaching and singing from my living room two doors down from the church.
I think about that yard all the time. By the time I left, one house on the block had been purchased, redesigned by a san francisco architect, the yard fenced off, interrupting the shared green, and closing off the shared collective space of the block. Back in my northeast LA neighborhood, a longtime resident recently documented a similar shift here in recent decades, fences and gates going up in front of homes. This contrasts sharply against the intimacy forged by the front porch, an architectural feature invented by enslaved black people in colonial America, who designed their dwellings with front porches to “retain the group-oriented social climate of Africa.”4
Collective purpose is not unique to the church. I’m writing this on a saturday morning at the coffeeshop counter under my bedroom floorboards; on a friday night at the local wine bar in Chinatown where I almost always run into friends while painstakingly writing out my ideas by hand; at the diner counter on my regular bike route while watching cook staff work the grill with polished efficiency. I listen to the espresso machine run and the mix of voices, regard the familiar faces of regulars, elders, and young newcomers, unable to metabolize the sheer scale of the city of LA and the multitudinous factors that spur movement and neighborhood change, diversification and gentrification, the real differences between a body inconvenienced and a body threatened, and the merely perceived differences that make us feel farther apart from each other than we might actually be.
Ray Oldenburg’s 1989 definition of third place is a communal public realm that provides space to be challenged by people different from oneself, through dialogue, conflict, or conversation. Oldenburg’s analysis pointed towards cafes, coffeehouses, main streets, and post offices, the sites between home and work where informality and frequent use of a given space “promotes social equity” and provides “a setting for grassroots politics.”5 Abolish the police, loiter forever, buy nothing. Resist eviction. Share freely.
“I am often struck by the dangerous narcissism fostered by spiritual rhetoric that pays so much attention to individual self improvement and so little to the practice of love within the context of community.”6
The disused church space that I see all over LA is already interspersed into existing residential communities. I want to see these buildings, once purposeful spaces of gathering and resource sharing that now sit empty, occupied by groups that are wide-ranging in age, occupation, interests, and relationship to the city. I want to see affordable housing projects built in wealthy neighborhoods where civic dollars have been hoarded, making the resources and amenities there accessible to a wide diversity of low-income residents. I want us integrating the best practices that arise from tangled histories of congregational will and religious conviction. Mutual aid not charity. The social activism and anarchism of catholic organizer Dorothy Day. The emphasis on grassroots locality that is inherent to small neighborhood churches.
As I double down on my writing practice in late January, KM asks “what it is that most inspires me.” It’s a neighborhood uncle yelling along on my behalf from the street corner when I cuss out an overzealous LA driver from my bike; nodding to an auntie at the bus stop; food cart vendors who’ve started to recognize me tracing up and down the avenue, jangling their bells and waving when I pass; every friend who honks and hollers to me while driving Figueroa; a community elder out on a walk doubling back to talk about the bullhorn handlebars and salmon-pink brake cable housing I’d built out at the local bike co-op; chance run-ins and hours of generative conversation with friends, and friends of friends, at the Chinatown wine bar on a night I’d thought I was just going out alone; strangers who recognize me from dancing at our twice weekly queer church because they see my familiar bike locked up, the out-of-context placement putting my dancing body back-in-context.
I’m watching how people congregate, gleaning what I can on bike and on foot, observing juxtapositions that confirm or challenge my preconceptions. Shared values are more nebulous and abstract, therefore broader and more encompassing, than merely shared activity or shared interest. Cultivating common purpose and spiritual openness, in the absence of total comprehension of what the collective is driving towards, demands trust and a grounded sense of belonging that is contingent on relationship and context. Irrespective of what you do or do not believe in, here is something that we’ve only got for a short time.
Jones, Jeffrey M. “U.S. Church Membership Falls Below Majority for First Time.” Gallup. 29 March 2021. https://news.gallup.com/poll/341963/church-membership-falls-below-majority-first-time.aspx
Gooden, Mario. Dark Space. Columbia Books on Architecture and the City. New York, 2016. Print.
Bjork-James, Sophie. “Christian Nationalism and LGBTQ Structural Violence in the United States.” Journal of Religion and Violence Vol. 7 No. 3. Philosophy Documentation Center. Vanderbilt University, 2019. https://www.jstor.org/stable/26949536
Draper, James. “From Slave Cabins to “Shotguns”: Perceptions on Africanisms in American Architecture. Historia Vol. 10. Eastern Illinois University, 2001. Print.
Oldenburg, Ray. The Great Good Place: Cafes, Coffee Shops, Community Centers, Beauty Parlors, General Stores, Bars, Hangouts, and How They Get You Through the Day. Paragon House. Michigan, 1989. Print.
hooks, bell. All About Love: New Visions. William Morrow. New York, 1999. Print.