Fate of historic KC church, furniture store up in the air following roof collapse
Built in 1904, the Westminster Congregational Church at 3600 Walnut Street served its congregation for more than 100 years as countless people took in its facade made of 22-inch-thick, locally sourced limestone.
While it’s no longer a hub for religious gatherings, the building is still a centerpiece in Kansas City’s Hanover Place neighborhood. It also has a home on the national and Kansas City lists of registered historic places. But, in the weeks after structural damage led to a chunk of the building’s roof caving in, the city has to now decide whether the building will stand or fall.
A few years ago, Sam Unruh, founder of Unruh Furniture, purchased the then-abandoned 36,000-square-foot building for $350,000. In September 2016, after nine months of renovations, Unruh Furniture unveiled in its new space.
A Kansas City Star story from the time detailed the former sanctuary — with a 65-foot ceiling and natural light streaming through the original golden stained-glass windows — where the furniture finishing area for final assembly, staining and painting.
Less than five years later, on Feb. 13, a structural failure caused the sanctuary’s roof to collapse in on itself.
The structure was deemed a “dangerous building” by the city’s Neighborhoods and Housing Services Department on Feb. 19. Unruh received an “emergency order to demolish” from the city, calling for the entire building to be torn down.
In a letter to his customers, which Unruh shared with The Star, he explained that in summer 2020, he and his colleagues noticed a crack in a primary truss holding up the 60-foot-tall ceiling.
“We spent several months trying to correct the member, but it proved to be beyond repair,” he wrote. “A couple of weeks ago the truss gave way, and brought the roof down with it.”
He said that while no one was in the building at the time of the collapse, he and his colleagues were still processing the loss of the old church.
“It’s raw and painful and very much overwhelming, but we will get through it,” he wrote.
In the meantime, they’ve moved their production equipment into a warehouse and are now looking for a new showroom space.
There may also be a future for the historic haven as well.
On Feb. 25, the Historic Kansas City Foundation, a nonprofit, made a plea to save the Gothic Revival building.
“The Main Street corridor has lost many historic buildings and many that are left are threatened,” the release said. “The City needs to make extraordinary effort to implement a safe standstill at this site so that reasonable mitigation and reclamation can be reviewed. The historic and scenic assets of the city must be protected and warrant better.”
A few hours after the Feb. 25 statement was issued calling for a standstill to the demolition, “so that reasonable mitigation and reclamation can be reviewed,” the foundation got their wish, at least temporarily.
Beth Breitenstein, a spokeswoman for Kansas City’s City Planning and Development Department, said the division’s historic preservation office put a hold on any demolition pending a structural assessment of the site. That will determine how much of the building can be preserved, if any.
Now the building’s fate ultimately comes down to how safe and structurally sound engineers deem the remains of the old church.
She said it’s the city’s job to build and harvest that sense of community that this neighborhood is expressing in wanting to preserve the old church, as long as it’s safe to do so.
“We don’t want to erase the past if we don’t have to with a structural issue,” Breitenstein said.
Brad Wolf, a city historic preservation officer, said dilemmas like this are common. As buildings grow older, and risk falling into disrepair if they don’t have regular tenants, then the community risks losing a piece of history.
He likened the Westminster Congregational Church, like other historical buildings, to “a physical manifestation” of the time period in which it was built.
Historical buildings serve as a “unique character” in their neighborhood, a message that rings true for Westminster, which a number of community members have reached out to him about, asking how they can help ensure the building remains standing.
Unruh told The Star on Monday that what happens next is mostly out of his control as he watches two different arms of the city “go back and forth with each other” over the fate of his building.
The whole thing, he said, has been a sad, painful ordeal. He recalled the tremendous amount of work his team put into the building — which he said was in disarray and lacked heating, electric and plumbing — hoping to make it a permanent home for their business.
Though he owns the building, Unruh said regardless of the city’s decision, it’s very unlikely he will make furniture out of it again, since it would require extensive repairs and he can’t put his business on hold until the building is restored to its former glory, if ever.
“We were just constantly trying to undo what 10 years of being vacant had done, and then for it to collapse is just so sad because it just kind of throws all of that away,” Unruh said.
The Star’s Joyce Smith contributed.
This story was originally published March 1, 2021 at 3:19 PM.
