Torstar News Service

From her usual spot on the last pew beside the cen­tre aisle, 88-year-old Lily Anthony watched as Rev. Bill Elliott stood below the pul­pit and declared the decon­se­cra­tion of their century-old congregation.

“Today as we leave this house of wor­ship, accept­ing that it will be removed and replaced, may we feel a sense of ful­fill­ment and com­ple­tion… and be able to depart in peace,” said Elliott, look­ing intently at some of the tear-stained faces of his congregation’s 60 members.

The day was Dec. 31, 2012, the last time mem­bers of Glebe Pres­by­ter­ian Church gath­ered in the mid­town church where Anthony had been bap­tized, mar­ried and laid her hus­band to rest.

“Every­one was ask­ing me if I was sad about the move but I told them I wasn’t,” Anthony said. “It was time to look onto the future.”

St. Clements Lofts – 173 Jones Avenue

Built in 1914, the church joins a hand­ful of places of wor­ship in Toronto being con­verted into lofts. This year alone, at least five are being trans­formed into lofts and town­houses. Just recently, St. Clement’s Angli­can Church in Leslieville was approved to be turned into 18 two-storey loft units with an exten­sion of 20 loft-style units to be built in a nearby vacant land.

Com­ment: Not sure about five con­ver­sion projects… I can add the Sanc­tu­ary Lofts at 1183 Duf­ferin Street to the 3 in this arti­cle. Unless it is a new one involv­ing this Glebe Pres­by­ter­ian Church, which is for sale, but not slated for any­thing quite yet.

“This is by no means a new phe­nom­e­non,” said Uni­ver­sity of Toronto pro­fes­sor Brian Clarke, who spe­cial­izes in Canada’s church his­tory. “But the rea­son why there seems to be an increase in churches being turned into things like lofts is that mem­ber­ships in con­gre­ga­tions are shrink­ing and aging.”

Clarke said that “main­line churches,” which are mostly affil­i­ated with Chris­tian­ity, make up about 57% of Toronto’s reli­gious pop­u­la­tion, accord­ing to the vol­un­tary 2011 National House­hold Sur­vey (NHS). They haven’t been grow­ing since the 1970s.

Accord­ing to fig­ures pro­vided by the churches, mem­ber­ship in the United Church declined by almost 10% from 24,210 in 2008 to 21,573 in 2011, while Pres­by­ter­ian atten­dance decreased by 24% from 7,500 in 2001 to 5,700 in 2011. The Angli­can Church has expe­ri­enced a steep 29% decline from 321,580 in the 2001 cen­sus to 227,925 in the 2011 NHS.

Only the Roman Catholic Church reported growth from 1.6 mil­lion in 2001 to 1.8 mil­lion in 2011, mostly due to immi­gra­tion, said spokesper­son Bill Stein­burg. The church has built four new parishes in the out­skirts of the GTA over the last four years.

Unable to shoul­der the finan­cial strain of main­tain­ing decades-old build­ings, how­ever, oth­ers haven’t been as lucky.

The United Church has closed six churches in the last three years while the Pres­by­ter­ian Church has closed eight, three of which were turned into lofts.

Union Lofts – 234 Perth Avenue

“If you look around, a lot of the older churches are built near each other in the gen­eral down­town area so peo­ple could walk there on Sun­days,” Clarke said. “But immi­grants tend to set­tle in the sub­urbs where there’s more afford­able hous­ing so there are no peo­ple to off­set the amount of peo­ple unable to go to church because of age.”

The west end in par­tic­u­lar has seen a surge in devel­op­ment in recent years, said senior city plan­ner Sarah Phipps, who over­sees Ward 18, which stretches from Park­dale, the Junc­tion to a part of Roncesvalles.

“Ward 18 is feel­ing the pres­sure right now as the city con­tin­ues to grow and every­thing towards the east has been devel­oped,” Phipps said.

Churches are espe­cially highly sought after by devel­op­ers, as they are mostly located in large, prime city lands, Phipps added.

Ward 18 is cur­rently home to two church loft con­ver­sions. Perth Avenue Methodist Church at 243 Perth Ave is being turned into Union Lofts, a 22-unit four-storey loft, while The Angli­can Church of St. Mary the Vir­gin and St. Cyprian is being con­verted into a 17-unit loft called West40.

West40 Lofts – 40 West­more­land Avenue

On its last stages of con­struc­tion, West40, a city-designated her­itage site built in 1912, is close to being sold out, said archi­tect Asen Vitko.

“There’s a demand for own­ing a piece of gen­uine real McCoy his­tory rather than recre­at­ing a struc­ture so it looks like some­thing from pre­vi­ous eras,” Vitko said.

Her­itage build­ings in Toronto are par­tic­u­larly pop­u­lar since the city “doesn’t have much his­tory left” after sev­eral his­tor­i­cal build­ings got demol­ished between the ’50s to ’70s’, he added.

Com­ment: Do not get me started on the archi­tec­tural and his­tor­i­cal holo­caust com­mit­ted in the 1950s through the 1970s.

But own­ing a sliver of his­tory doesn’t come cheap.

Con­ver­sions are usu­ally priced higher than new con­struc­tions due to repairs that require recre­at­ing old water and century-old con­struc­tion tech­niques orig­i­nally used when the build­ing was first constructed.

A two-bedroom unit at West40 costs around $750,000 while a new condo unit of the same size at Ron­ces­valles is priced at around $575,000.

Since most churches in Toronto are her­itage build­ings, the process of con­ver­sion is much more tedious, Phipps said.

Instead of only con­sult­ing city plan­ners, devel­op­ers also have to work with her­itage archi­tects to ensure that addi­tions still pre­serve the building’s history.

The com­plex­ity of church to loft con­ver­sions, how­ever, does not deter Vitko, who calls the “mar­ry­ing of new con­struc­tion to orig­i­nal con­struc­tion” a labour of love.”

Phipps agreed, say­ing the loft con­ver­sions are a good use of the old churches and the space they have.

“These loft con­ver­sions keep Toronto’s his­tory intact and pro­vide unique solu­tions to extend the life of these buildings.”

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Con­tact the Jef­frey Team for more infor­ma­tion – 416−388−1960

Lau­rin & Natalie Jef­frey are Toronto Real­tors with Cen­tury 21 Regal Realty.
They did not write these arti­cles, they just repro­duce them here for peo­ple
who are inter­ested in Toronto real estate. They do not work for any builders.
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