Our feature OKI Wanna Know is a chance for you to get an explanation for those off-the-wall questions without obvious answers. This week, we visit some religious leftovers.
Mark Feighery lives in Dayton now, but still has his eye on his hometown of Cincinnati. He actually did some of the legwork for his question.
"There is, what I kind of regard as a disembodied church steeple in the Findlay Market area in Over-the-Rhine. So, I did some research and I discovered the steeple is the remnant of what was St. John the Baptist Church, but why was the steeple saved?"
Where St. John the Baptist Church stood at the corner of Green and Republic is now the Over-the-Rhine Community Center, but the tower still stands. A professor of church history at Mt. St. Mary's Seminary says it was one of the largest parishes in a very dense German Catholic neighborhood.
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Father David Endres says it was a busy place.
"This parish, at one time, had something like 700 baptisms a year, 200 weddings a year, and 500 funerals," he says. "Just a crazy amount of people."
Endres says the church closed in 1969 with fewer than 200 parishioners. "There was certainly a lot of demographic change that occurred from a 19th century ethnic urban neighborhood to the time right after World War II. Catholics, a lot of them are moving up the hills," he says. "You have St. Frances Seraph is close by. Old St. Mary's is close by. St. Paul's is close by. There's just no need for that number of churches in a very small geographic area anymore."
Endres says when it was announced the church would close, the city of Cincinnati showed interest in buying the property and turning the building into a community center. But that took a while, and by the time the city was ready to take possession, the church was falling apart.
"From what I've been able to determine, there was an interest in keeping this tower as a memory of the Catholic and German heritage of that area. It's kind of an odd thing if you think about it, because it's a partial relic of the past," he says. "It's not the only one like that. I think that somewhere in Walnut Hills I believe there's a Presbyterian church where it's just the tower that stands."
Here is the steeple, where is the church?
There are actually two free-standing church towers in that area. Geoffrey Sutton with the Walnut Hills Historical Society says the First Presbyterian Church at Gilbert and Taft was not founded by Reverend James Kemper, who was instrumental in early Walnut Hills history.
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"His family started a church which they called the Walnut Hills Presbyterian Church. And then Lane Seminary was founded in 1830, 1832, something like that."
Sutton says there was a schism over predestination.
"The Kempers' Presbyterian church and the chapel at Lane Seminary had two completely different congregations and were not on good terms," he says. "After the Civil War, the old school and new school reconciled."
Around 1878 the two churches decided to merge into one congregation. Sutton says from there the story of the First Presbyterian is a lot like St. John the Baptist's.
"The congregation mostly moved away and there just weren't enough people to keep it going," Sutton says. "I believe they tried to find a nonprofit sort of agency to move in with social services, but they couldn't find anyone. The building was in pretty sad shape and very expensive to maintain."
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Sutton says the church demolition started around 2003, and stabilization of the tower wrapped up around 2008.
About a mile east of the First Presbyterian tower, there's another church steeple without a church.
Sutton says that belonged to the Seventh Presbyterian Church, a congregation that started Downtown, but moved up to East Walnut Hills.
"That one was finished right around the same time as the Walnut Hills Presbyterian Church," he says. "That one actually did burn down in — I think it was 1971."
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Sutton says that congregation began to shrink too. There was a lengthy discussion over getting a new pastor when a new church was built, and who owned the church's endowment. Eventually, the Seventh Presbyterian closed in 2009. Within a few years, the church was torn down, the property sold and replaced by homes.
But the steeple still stands.
"It is a very good thing for the neighborhood that they maintained that facade, because it's very, very lovely," Sutton says. "Putting those buildings, those big square buildings without ornament into the neighborhood I think would have disappointed people."
