Big Hairy Audicious Building Move ..possibly to custom floating vessel
May 30, 2019 8:20 AM Subscribe
During (Cardinal) Dolan's Downsizing, in a combined parish near me, a smaller church was chosen to remain open, while a larger church was closed because behind the scenes, the charter school that had been renting the school affiliated with the larger church wanted to buy the property to expand the school, and are now in contract to do so.
The people who attended the larger church were then told by the Catholic hierarchy to go to the smaller church. I get that in an archdiocese as big as that of NYC, there are some churches which have been underutilized, but this wasn't one of them.Did I mention that the larger church (seats 1,000+) had something like three times the parish population of the smaller church (legal building capacity: 600)? Also, much of this parish population is Hispanic, and on the subject of "demographic shift", did you know that the Hispanic population of the US is currently having a baby boom? This has produced crowding that besides not being conducive to the peace one should associate with a house of worship, at times leads to overcrowding extreme enough to become dangerous and illegal. Besides the fact that this means that for the past five years priests have been thumbing their noses at building capacity laws, if the putative buyers go forward with their plans, they reportedly plan to demolish the larger church, and there is no going back from that. To the best of my knowledge, there are no plans for a new larger replacement church. BTW, the larger church is in good shape structurally, it actually has fewer open violations with the Dept. of Buildings than the smaller church. And I know that while it is possible for a real estate transaction to fall through, it also isn't common. Incidently, the older church has aesthetically pleasing qualities that cause people passing by it to express dismay that the plan is to have it demolished, and caused many former parishioners to say "it is the most beautiful church" when discussing their house of worship. To cut to the chase, if the leadership of the charter school is willing to make a deal, and people are willing to crowdfund this enterprise, I would want to suggest physically moving the older church off the site, as a compromise, so they can continue the plan, and the older church can be preserved somewhere else. I found out it is possible from an engineering standpoint, but there is no are of empty land in the immediate neighborhood large enough to consider as a new site for the old church. The church is located not far from the coast, and I want to eliminate land from all future deliberations concerning this church anyway. I know that in NYC and Philadelphia's past, there were floating churches, but I don't know how big they were, and they seem to have been constructed of wood, and therefore lighter. There was, until recently a modern floating chapel, considerably smaller (seated 100), made from modern materials, such as fiberglass, and floated on a pontoon barge. My original question would have been, 'Can you float a smallish Cathedral on a largish barge?' Aircraft carriers and container ships are top-heavy, so a custom-built water craft modeled after one of these might be a naval engineering solution to this problem. The revised question: 'How much would it cost to build one of these as a floating platform capable of holding a large brick church, what firm(s) would be capable of building such a thing, what are the legalities involved, and how to get the church from the giant flatbed truck to the specialized watercraft?' I'm thinking giant crane(s)?
The people who attended the larger church were then told by the Catholic hierarchy to go to the smaller church. I get that in an archdiocese as big as that of NYC, there are some churches which have been underutilized, but this wasn't one of them.Did I mention that the larger church (seats 1,000+) had something like three times the parish population of the smaller church (legal building capacity: 600)? Also, much of this parish population is Hispanic, and on the subject of "demographic shift", did you know that the Hispanic population of the US is currently having a baby boom? This has produced crowding that besides not being conducive to the peace one should associate with a house of worship, at times leads to overcrowding extreme enough to become dangerous and illegal. Besides the fact that this means that for the past five years priests have been thumbing their noses at building capacity laws, if the putative buyers go forward with their plans, they reportedly plan to demolish the larger church, and there is no going back from that. To the best of my knowledge, there are no plans for a new larger replacement church. BTW, the larger church is in good shape structurally, it actually has fewer open violations with the Dept. of Buildings than the smaller church. And I know that while it is possible for a real estate transaction to fall through, it also isn't common. Incidently, the older church has aesthetically pleasing qualities that cause people passing by it to express dismay that the plan is to have it demolished, and caused many former parishioners to say "it is the most beautiful church" when discussing their house of worship. To cut to the chase, if the leadership of the charter school is willing to make a deal, and people are willing to crowdfund this enterprise, I would want to suggest physically moving the older church off the site, as a compromise, so they can continue the plan, and the older church can be preserved somewhere else. I found out it is possible from an engineering standpoint, but there is no are of empty land in the immediate neighborhood large enough to consider as a new site for the old church. The church is located not far from the coast, and I want to eliminate land from all future deliberations concerning this church anyway. I know that in NYC and Philadelphia's past, there were floating churches, but I don't know how big they were, and they seem to have been constructed of wood, and therefore lighter. There was, until recently a modern floating chapel, considerably smaller (seated 100), made from modern materials, such as fiberglass, and floated on a pontoon barge. My original question would have been, 'Can you float a smallish Cathedral on a largish barge?' Aircraft carriers and container ships are top-heavy, so a custom-built water craft modeled after one of these might be a naval engineering solution to this problem. The revised question: 'How much would it cost to build one of these as a floating platform capable of holding a large brick church, what firm(s) would be capable of building such a thing, what are the legalities involved, and how to get the church from the giant flatbed truck to the specialized watercraft?' I'm thinking giant crane(s)?
This post was deleted for the following reason: Hey, drop us a line using the contact form to discuss how to rework this. -- restless_nomad
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