52nd City

War at St. Aloysius Gonzaga

The sky was a bright, vivid shade of orange tonight, staying that way for a good 10-20 minutes. With camera in car, I motored over to St. Aloysius Gonzaga, the doomed church complex on The Hill, scheduled to be demolished this week. The sky almost lasted for me, but the sun was dipping as my car came to a rest on Pearl. Orange became pink became blue.

As I arrived at the old church’s multiple buildings, I couldn’t help but notice a group of teens, enthusiastically shooting air pistols at one another. Half, the snipers, were on the second floor of the old rectory. The other half, the ground troops, took shelter behind trees and huge piles of turned dirt on the front lawn. Pellets slapped off the brick face of the building, occasionally hitting a window with a sharp “ping.” Neighbors, it seemed, weren’t bothered by the sights and sounds of youthful conflict, as they stood along a nearby street, walked their dogs, sat on porches.

Deciding to pause on my initial thought to phone 911 – well, my first, true impulse was to shake my fist, yelling ineffectual rants at these freckle-faced warriors – I started taking some snaps of the rectory, the nunnery, the gym and the church itself. (The former school had already been turned into a raked bed of Missouri clay.) The kids, seeing me nose into their fight, flipped out a bit, signaling one another like little recon men, gesturing with heads and hands from blown-out windows.

Once we started talking, though, the battle paused and life got interesting.

The kids had gone to school at St. Al’s, they’d worshipped there.

“We’ve been in here for 15 years,” boasted the hyper leader of the group, a bit of a ringer for a young Anthony Michael Hall. “We know it pretty well.”

After trailing through the rectory on my own – the building easily accessed by a broken screen door – I circled the church. Two of the combatants walked me to a back wall, proud to let someone from outside the neighborhood in on a secret. They pointed at a window, the lip of which was five feet above the ground. I’d have to hoist myself up there, then jump down into the mostly-gutted church hall.

“I’ll hold your camera,” one of them offered.

I paused, thinking about the camera’s cost and the kid’s potential speed at a full sprint, but he had an honest face, I had few options and I gave it over. I crawled up, as I heard one of the kids’ moms hector him for… something, or another. Steadying myself in the foot-wide ledge before jumping, I assured her that I wasn’t there for salvage, just for photos. She seemed okay with my explanation. I started getting okay with the jump.

I jumped. The kid handed me the camera. He crawled, he jumped. His friend crawled, he jumped. Inside, the other kids were already in action, scrambling up stairwells, tossing around plastic plants, occasionally still shooting at one another, the pellets clanging off of wood, plaster, glass.

“We don’t want to hurt the place,” one said. Pause. “Not that it could hurt.”

Inside the two buildings, a wealth of little things reminded of this place’s lived past. Pews scattered, snapped in two. A fork on a window sill. Scraps of note paper. Other touches were recent, less pleasant. Graffiti, which someone had attempted to scrape off a wall. A toilet, backed up and overflowing with waste. Real estate signage.

Even in the gloom and rather murky heat of the church hall, the place had a certain, palpable presence. Babies were baptized here. Couples were married. Hymns were sung for the recently passed.

Now, kids were going wild in here, the space’s last few hours more active than anticipated.

Driving up to St. Al’s tonight, those actions had initially pissed me off.

But, now, it was obvious that the kids were just celebrating their own short history in this world. Why begrudge them a little fun?

More than any developer or Archdiocese decision-maker, after all, this church was their church.

(For some pictures, check: http://www.flickr.com/photos/51252573@N00/sets/72057594106607265/.)