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Third Baptist Church

One would never know from the obviously twentieth-century streamlined Gothic style of Third Baptist Church that the building was originally constructed in 1884.  It was the third home of the congregation, which was founded in 1850 as an offshoot of Second Baptist Church (now at McKnight and Clayton Roads) “that there might be a Baptist church in the western part of the city.”  After worshipping in a market hall on Market Street near 13th, Third Baptist built a chapel at 14th and Clark in 1854 and added a larger church there in 1866.  (That site is now the ramp to US 40 opposite Kiel Center.)  The 1884 building was more or less Gothic in style, with rock-faced stonework, sharp gables, and squared windows.

At that time, Grand and Washington was the center of a fashionable residential neighborhood, with Vandeventer Place only three blocks away and churches of several denominations nearby, one of which is now the Grandel Square Theatre.  The convergence of public transportation lines in this area, however, gradually transformed it into a commercial center.  About 1918, Washington Avenue, which previously had jogged at this point, was cut straight through the block, creating the triangular park to the south and exposing the church’s side elevation to the street.  A major remodeling at this time was wiped out on July 11, 1928, when fire gutted the interior, and the present auditorium dates from that rebuilding, completed at the end of 1930.  The architect responsible for the new chancel, if not the rest of the interior, was Louis Baylor Pendleton (1875-1964), a graduate of Georgia Institute of Technology who had served as architect to the city.  He designed a new education building along the Washington Avenue side in 1941, and when the rest of the exterior was rebuilt in 1951, he teamed up with William B. Ittner, Inc., the firm left by the famous designer of schools, who had died in 1936.  The urban location of the church is forthrightly recognized in the new design and in the inscription on the broad corner elevation, “Where Cross The Crowded Ways of Life. . .”  Its prototypes are a small group of downtown churches of New York, Chicago, and Seattle.

While the lobby has the sleek lines of 1951, beyond that we return to the 1920s and the same finely wrought ornamental plasterwork seen in the picture palaces that were going up at that time along this stretch of Grand, and drawn from almost as wide a range of sources.  While the chancel may be Gothic, the iron columns supporting the balcony are Corinthian, and the pilasters on the walls are Byzantine.  The flat ceiling is decorated in an elaborate ropework pattern reminiscent of Jacobean plasterwork.  The overall effect is unlike any other church in St. Louis.

Once the largest congregation in the city, Third Baptist remains a vital institution in St. Louis.  The Chamber Chorus visited this church on October 4, 1998 to present its “Brazilian Voices” concert, on May 20, 2001 to present a program based on settings of Shakespeare, and on November 14, 2004 for its “Lovers and Lyres” program.  The Chorus’ fifth compact disc, Rome’s Golden Poets, was also recorded in this sanctuary.