Following holocaust, St. Mark’s stabilization efforts begin

WEST ORANGE, NJ — The effort to stabilize the former St. Mark’s Episcopal Church building, the nearly 200-year-old historic site severely damaged by a fire on New Year’s Day, has officially begun after township construction official Tom Tracey gave final approval to engineer Guy Lagomarsino’s proposed shoring plans earlier this month.

Jack Sayers, the township business administrator, told the West Orange Chronicle that workers have started to clear away the debris left by the blaze, which consists of 2 feet of charred remnants in the building’s basement. Sayers said at least some of the rubble has to be removed before the actual shoring process can be initiated. Right now, he said there is no timeframe planned for that cleanup to end and the stabilization work to begin.

Once enough debris is cleared, shoring will start: lateral braces will be placed on the church walls roughly 5 and 12 feet up, as Lagomarsino previously told the Chronicle. The Optimized Engineering Associates principal said stabilizing beams called “rakers” set 15 to 20 feet away should then be placed diagonally against the wall at a 45-degree angle, anchored to the braces. The rakers should be held in place on the ground with concrete blocks, he said.

This should be the setup around the building — Lagomarsino said he recommended putting two in the front, four or five on each side and a few in the back. By doing so, he said the church walls will be propped up enough to prevent them from falling outward. Once this is done and workers are able to climb on top of the structure, he said beams should be placed across the tops of the walls to keep the structure from collapsing inward.

Upon the structure’s stabilization, Sayers said the property owner, the International Federation of Chaplains, will have to present the township with its plans for refurbishing the building, for which Tracey will then have to issue all necessary permits. It was originally mandated that the federation should supply such plans by late February — a deadline it did not meet — but the business administrator said the township did not issue any penalty because it understood why the timeframe was exceeded.

“It’s obviously a big job, and the engineer took a little longer getting it done than we had anticipated it would take,” Sayers said in a March 24 phone interview.

Sayers added that he is not sure whether Tracey has issued a new deadline. At this point, he said, the township would just like to see the structure stabilized.

When the church is eventually rebuilt, its owner may not have to worry about replacing the stained glass windows. Councilwoman Susan McCartney — who, along with township historian Joseph Fagan, was one of the people who discovered that the federation had actually thrown out the building’s windows after removing them without a permit in the weeks before the fire — told the Chronicle that a former colleague recently alerted her to an auction for several stained glass windows taken from the now-closed Avon Baptist Church in Avon-by-the-Sea, New Jersey. McCartney said she informed the federation about the auction as a way of supporting the church when the council’s options are otherwise limited.

“Since (the property) is privately owned, I just thought it would be one way of helping them without costing the taxpayers any money,” McCartney said in a March 24 phone interview.

McCartney said the federation representative with whom she spoke definitely sounded interested in bidding on the windows, though she does not know whether they actually did so. No one from the federation or the borough of Avon-by-the-Sea responded to requests for comment before press time March 29.

Meanwhile, the Iglesia de Dios Pentecostal Church, for whose congregation the federation had purchased St. Mark’s in March 2015, is back holding services in West Orange thanks to the generosity of one notable local family. Larry Drill, whose company Drill Construction is the second largest property owner in town, said his family has been allowing the congregation use part of the commercial office building it owns at 80 Main St. rent-free during the past few weeks. The arrangement is not permanent, Drill pointed out, but he hopes that it will allow the church to get back on its feet and eventually reconstruct St. Mark’s.

Drill is not expecting any pats on the back, either. While others would consider his deed to be a selfless act, he said he just feels it was “the right thing to do.”

“That’s what neighbors should do,” Drill told the Chronicle in a March 24 phone interview. “If a tragedy happens to your neighbor’s house, you want to help them any way you can.”

The West Orange community can still help the church members too, Drill said. He pointed out that it will cost the relatively small congregation a lot of money to rebuild the former Main Street icon, and he is sure any donations residents can afford to give would be greatly appreciated.

But even if providing monetary support is not a possibility, Drill encouraged people to think of other ways to lend a hand.

“Sometimes it’s easier than you’d think,” Drill said.

  Joseph Fagan, St. Mark’s Church