Needless to say, I was shocked as I was coming down Red Bud Avenue to discover the former church, which last functioned as a community space known as the Sanctuary but had been sitting vacant for many years, was sitting wide open, clearly having been gutted by a major fire.

The church was built as the Bethany Evangelisch Church in 1915, and the congregation stayed here until 1971 when now part of the United Church of Christ, merged with another the Peace United Church of Christ, which had been founded in 1955. The newly combined church moved to Spanish Lake, where it still exists. The Bethany church had been in existence since 1867 with two former locations on the Near North Side. A cemetery associated with the congregation still operates at the intersection of St. Charles Rock and Lucas and Hunt roads.

The building has had a convoluted history since the Bethany United Church of Christ moved out. Two other congregations owned it according to City records before it was purchased by the North Side Partnership in July of 2014, which used it as a community center.

The fire, which I apparently missed in the St. Louis Fire Department’s Twitter feed, seems to have occurred in the first week of January of 2023.