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This is From the Archives, where we present something from our extensive collection of archival photos, records and all manner of materials dating back to when the church was First Methodist Episcopal, to First Methodist, to Church of the Savior, to St. Paul's to Crossroads.
This week's archives items are two similar and remarkable Repository photos of our church that span the decades from 1954 to 1988.
As you may know, our 1883 building has many lower areas that require a certain amount of bravery to go into - scary or dark boiler rooms or sub-basements, for instance.
But the building also has many high places that are either difficult, scary or even quite dangerous for people to go to.
We have an attic space above our sanctuary, for instance, that someone must go up into on a regular basis to be able to change the light bulbs in our sanctuary hanging lights. If you've ever looked at those lights, they are all on long chains, and someone must go up into the attic and lower those fixtures down to the ground on those chains so that someone else on the ground can then change the light bulbs. And then, of course, the person in the attic must lift those lights up back into place. This is why we use LED lights in those fixtures now, to make that occurrence as rare as possible.
But while the attic space is very high and it is quite scary to be up there, there is no higher place in our entire church you can go to than our tower and steeple.
Our tower holds not only a real bell (that we ring every Sunday at 9:44 am before the carillon prelude), but also four loudspeakers for our carillon (it is said that the range of those speakers is around three miles, maybe five on a clear day). If you've ever seen it, we have a long and scary-looking ladder that you have to climb up inside the tower to get to all of this, although the ladder only gets you part of the way up. Once you get to the top of the ladder, then you have to navigate a series of rickety 1883 staircases to finally get up to the part of the tower where the bell and carillon speakers are.
It should also be noted that this upper staircase area just below the bell is a part of the building with no electricity or lights, so if you do go up there, remember to bring a flashlight or at least your phone.
But even the bell part of the tower isn't the absolute highest place you could go on our building, as these two photos show.
The first photo is from a Repository article from 1994 where they used their own file photo from 1954 to show a brave man named MS Fisk hanging on at the very top of our steeple, higher even than our bell, doing some post-lightning repair work. There is no inside way to get to that point, which means either he climbed up on the outside the entire way (like Spiderman), or Mr Fisk may have climbed up the ladder on the inside and stepped out of the tower near the top and just shimmied up the rest of the way himself. Either way, brave man!
The second photo is also from the Repository, this time from 1988, showing someone doing almost the same exact kind of repair work in almost the exact same spot, the very top of our steeple. This unnamed man, however, is slightly more safely doing his work from a cage on a crane.
This very top of our steeple is quite literally the highest point on our entire building, and what an elite group of people it is indeed who have been able to touch it with their own hands - whether it's the people who built it in 1883, or the people who have come along since in 1954, 1988 or at any other time, to repair it.
(Click to open the images in new windows.)
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