Remembering Memorial Chapel
Lincolnville church was bulldozed on Monday without required permit
By PETER GUINTA
http://staugustine.com/stories/030309/news_030309_018.shtml
LINCOLNVILLE -- Pink and blue Lakeside Memorial Chapel at 74 Park Place, which for 45 years held 10 a.m. Sunday services under the open sky, was demolished Monday by order of the property's new owners, Todd Mitchell and Roy Campbell Jr.
The odd little church with no roof, surrounded by trees and flowers and homemade crosses, is gone. The chapel was never an official landmark but was always known by locals as a special place.
St. Augustine building officials said Monday that Mitchell Management Inc., 26 Riberia St., and East Coast Financial LLC, 65 Lewis Blvd., purchased the building at a tax auction in April.
County records show they bought the property for $55,000 though it's assessed at $176,768.
However, Director of Planning and Building Mark Knight said the new owners had never applied for a demolition permit and soon will appear before the city's Code Enforcement Board for possible disciplinary action.
That meeting has not yet been set, he said.
Knight said Mitchell and Campbell want to build two single-family houses on the lot.
"But because of the (city's) aggregation ordinance, they can't build two structures. I believe they may build only one single-family house there. They argue that it's two properties. Our perception is that it's one."
Neither Mitchell or Campbell could be reached for comment Monday.
Previous owner Von Clark said that for years, the chapel served as a "beacon of light that never let the Devil get comfortable in Lincolnville."
She and her sister Pat, both former musicians who performed as The Clark Sisters, inherited the property from their parents, who were building a church there but died before it was finished. The sisters took the work up in 1964, when their mother died.
The roof was never completed.
"I appreciate somebody letting me know (about the demolition)," Clark said, grieved by the news. "I put my whole life into that corner. The Devil's been after that place for a long time. Now he's got it."
The Clark sisters were daughters of a hard-working fisherman and crabber who sold his catch downtown, friends said. The girls and their three brothers were home-schooled by their mother and both learned music, as well as how to sew, stitch and alter clothing.
Clark said the chapel was built on the same site as a long-ago wooden, two-story Presbyterian church. Some Lincolnville residents said the older church rotted away, others that it was destroyed by fire.
Long-time Lincolnville resident Elizabeth Hill, a retired teacher, lives close to the property and said she heard a strange noise about 9:30 Monday, went to her door and saw a backhoe and "baby" bulldozer on the property.
The cinder blocks had already been removed, she said.
Clark said rumors the church was built using old plumbing materials, recycled materials or trash are untrue. But she did admit rescuing a discarded piano, painting it blue and playing it during services while Pat sang.
The piano remains in her Blanco Street home now, one of her few remembrances of the chapel.
"The community raised the money to build this chapel. Some of those people are still around," she said. "I didn't know they could demolish a building without informing the neighborhood."
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