Flatbush Unitarian
Universalist Church – A Remembrance
by
Melissa Reed
In 1976 I moved
into Flatbush Unitarian Universalist Church in Brooklyn, New York, as its caretaker
– sexton, to use the church’s word. Unemployed
and coming from an apartment I didn’t like, I remained in the church for three
years. The Board gave me a stipend of $15 a week and a small room at the end of
the organ loft, which overlooked the sanctuary. The parlor, where congregants socialized after
Sunday morning services, was beneath the loft; the kitchen and bathroom were in
the basement. On the evening of my first
night there, I attended a meeting in the basement – undercroft, as they called
it -- intended to enhance good feelings among members. I myself had but
recently become one. When I returned
upstairs I saw that my room had been disturbed. It was of no particular comfort
that, since I didn’t have much, not much was taken. An enameled pillbox my aunt had made was
missing and I minded that.
The Board decided
I needed a dog for protection. A member’s client who took in stray dogs in
Brooklyn’s Bensonhurst section, picked Charley, a mixed-breed medium-size black
and white terrier, a dog who would only nip at the heels of an offender, not go
for the jugular. When a few policemen
showed up to investigate the burglary, one said, “That dog doesn’t seem too
certain about being here." By the
next week, Charley was in charge. I
would periodically get calls from a woman who said she was a cancer patient who
lived across the street. To see Charley
running around the fenced-in yard, she said, made her feel good. The three of us – the dog, the cat who’d come
with me and I – had free run of the place when no one was there and we juggled
our existence around activities in the building.
The memories of members
active in the ‘70s did not go much farther back than the ‘60s, when membership
was robust. In 1968 a strike by teachers
shut down New York City public schools for more than a month. The church’s minister
took a position against the teachers and the half the congregation, many of
them teachers, resigned their memberships.
The minister himself left and by the time I began attending the church
had been replaced by a three-minister rotation.
Sweat equity, members’ annual pledges and income from rentals supported activities
and building upkeep. The small congregation of 20 or 30 regulars were socially-liberal
congregants from a variety of religious upbringings. They took well to sermons premised on texts,
as one of my friends quipped, from The New York Times editorials, and they were
not shy about letting the minister know where he’d gone wrong in the “talk-back”
sessions that followed sermons.
My job, basically,
was to keep the place in usable condition.
The three most common uses during my three years were Sunday morning
services, Alan Banks’ dance school and wedding rentals. The congregation’s interests focused primarily
on Sunday mornings; the rentals were somewhat beneath the notice of everyone
except me and the treasurer. To make the basement suitable for the dance school
rental, it had been outfitted with large mirrors and barres. The large space
was more than adequate for the children and adults who came to learn the
fundamentals of classic ballet and modern dance. Mr. Banks, formerly a dancer
with the Ballet de Monte Carlo, later the artistic director of the Brooklyn
Civic Ballet Company, asked only one thing of me: never wax the floor. That was easy.
Some couples who
could not or did not want to be married under the auspices of their childhood
religions found a ceremony in our sanctuary acceptable. “You Can Be a Mystic and a Unitarian” and
“You Can Be an Athiest and a Unitarian” proclaimed some of the pamphlets in the
literature rack in the parlor. Although
the congregation was not large enough for subgroups to explore other beliefs
and practices, the point was: everyone is
welcome. The wedding I most remember was
that of a couple who selected for their ceremony the parlor, which was a small,
appealing space separated from the sanctuary by a partition. Its leaded glass windows overlooked shrubbery
and there was a working fireplace at one end. After I showed the wedding party
into the parlor, one of them opened the door to the sanctuary and glanced down
the rows of pews to the altar at the far end.
Above it a large stained glass window depicted a child between a man and
a woman whose height, equal to that of the man, reflected the founding members’
commitment to gender equality. As soon
as the bridal couple saw the sanctuary, they insisted the ceremony be at the
altar. I was quite taken aback. When no events were scheduled, I often moved
my cat’s litter box from my room to the parlor.
Earlier that day I had moved it into the sanctuary behind a back
pew. The distractions of the occasion must
have absorbed everyone’s attention, as I heard not a word of complaint.
For a couple of
months while I was there, the church rented its sanctuary to the Ryan Repertory
Company for weekday evening use. The
company had been founded a few years before and did not have a permanent
home. Led by an able director, Ryan Rep attracted
gifted singers and dancers, many of them seemingly marking time until their big
break on Off Broadway, if not Broadway itself. For months they rehearsed then put
on public performances of Godspell, followed
by Oklahoma!.They were loud, lively
and lovely. My seat on the organ loft gave me a commanding view of their
activities and I enjoyed it thoroughly. I missed them when they left for a
space that was all their own.
There were small
incidents – the dog lifting his leg to leave his mark through the fence onto
the sandaled foot of a community leader; funny incidents – the wife of one of the
ministers looking in vain for someone to sit at the head table at the annual
Seder and turning me away, “What! The
sexton at the head table!”; alarming
incidents – the disappearance of my
white cat William, who, five days after I had reconciled myself to never seeing
him again, emerged mewing on the roof, black from contact with beams charred
from a fire of decades before.
The church was
fortunate when a Julliard student, Michael McFrederick, became our organist in
1977 or ’78. The organ, which he played
beautifully, was kept in tune, and he worked heroically, if with limited
success, to create a choir of some of us who were musically inclined. In early June 1979 he announced that he would
be performing at Carnegie Recital Hall.
Several of us attended. Joseph Horowitz reviewed the performance in The
New York Times on June 11:
[T]he
entire evening was such a delight….Without preaching, or resorting to theories,
Mr. McFrederick applies jazz and popular elements to a predominantly
“classical” idiom, and he generally gets away with it…. It fit the spirit of
the occasion that the entire audience was
invited to a post‐concert party[emphasis added].
I attended the
party, which was held in an apartment on the Upper West Side. After walking
about, nibbling on chips and hors d'oeuvres, on the way to the door I sampled
the contents of a punch bowl. A man standing nearby mentioned someone had
been keeping the bowl full by adding vodka.
If that was a warning, it came too late.
On the subway to Brooklyn, I got off at the Atlantic Avenue stop and sat
on a bench waiting for the train to Flatbush. I passed in and out of
consciousness, but somehow got home, vowing that I would never take a drink from
a punch bowl again.
When the
architectural plans for the building were completed in the late 1800s, the
congregation was meeting in rented space on Church Avenue. The address on the plans, 1901 Beverly Road,
Brooklyn, Long Island, was outmoded as soon as 1898, when Brooklyn was
incorporated into the City of New York. For decades the church – Flatbush Unitarian,
then after merging with the Universalists, Flatbush Unitarian Universalist
Church -- was a robust presence in the neighborhood. After the mid-40s, the large homes which once
surrounded the church were replaced by apartment buildings. The church never recovered from the membership
losses of the ’60s, by the mid-70s very few congregants lived within walking
distance, and the Sunday school was not enrolling new children. In 1979 I moved out of the building and it
was sold to another church, Unity East Center, which continues to occupy it.
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