Joe, a reader of this blog, writes: “I thought you might like seeing a video of the Palo Alto Unitarian Church from 1958, “The Groundbreaking and Construction of the Church Main Hall and Buildings.” This film was shot by Donald Borthwick and William Kellogg from March to July 1958. In 2007, Rae and Elton Bell had the 8mm film digitized and transferred onto a DVD to show at a celebration at the Unitarian Universalist Church of Palo Alto (UUCPA). I added the music and uploaded it to Google Video.”
Those of you who aren’t part of UUCPA may find this excruciatingly boring (unless you’ve worked in construction, in which case you’ll be saying to yourself over and over again, Boy I can tell this was before the days of OSHA). So watch a minute or two, and notice that the church is being built far from the center of Palo Alto, but along a road where cars pass several times a minute. This was where you were supposed to build churches in the late 1950s: at the edge of suburban development along a fairly busy road (gas was cheap in the 1950s, and public transportation was considered passe).
The fellow wearing the clerical robe at the beginning is Rev. Danford Lyon, then minister of the church. Thanks for uploading the video, Joe!
“This was where you were supposed to build churches in the late 1950s: at the edge of suburban development along a fairly busy road (gas was cheap in the 1950s, and public transportation was considered passe).”
This speaks volumes about the mistakes of our auto-based society, and the cul-de-sac of development that our own denomination is guilty of. Beautiful historic churches at this time were being lost left and right, sometimes over issues related to parking. I actually did a sermon on this very topic earlier this year. It’s one of those white elephants UU’s like to gloss over in their quest to pursue more conveyable social justice issues.
Churches that only serve those able to drive are as tacit a form of discrimination as accessibility and other design items. It’s classism at its worst, and the fact that so few UU churches provide vans or carpools or other transportation options only adds insult to injury.
I apologize for posting such a harsh comment on something that is supposed to be a positive, but there are few issues I feel as strongly about, and this is one we’ve done our best to ignore at best.
Jeremiah @ 1 — No apology needed. That’s why I brought up the topic in the first place.
We’re lucky here in Palo Alto — in the intervening years, there has been fairly dense development around us (dense compared to suburbia in other parts of the country, that is) so a good number of our church members bike and walk to church. And since this church was founded in the late 1940s, it’s not like we abandoned an old downtown church (the old Bernard Maybeck Unitarian church had been sold in the 1920s when the previous Unitarian church here went out of business).
Really? Maybeck? Is that building still in existence? Where is it? I had a high school friend who lived in a Maybeck house in Ross. They were Unitarians too.