As 120-year-old Stevens Point church building faces demolition, group plans memorial

A group of Stevens Point history buffs will hold a memorial service Sunday for a 120-year-old church building that’s set to be demolished.

The Trinity Lutheran Church building in Stevens Point is a small, Gothic Revival-style church built at the turn of the 20th century. Beginning in the late 1980s, it was the home of the Turning Point Dance Studio. A broken wooden figure of a dancer is still visible on a sign in the front.

But the building has been vacant since 2013, and in 2017, the city purchased it for redevelopment.

Last year, Stevens Point deemed the building beyond repair. In January, it took demolition bids.

“There’s nothing else quite like it in Stevens Point,” said Chelsey Pfiffner, a Stevens Point-area native who lives in Milwaukee. Pfiffner runs the website Historic Stevens Point, and is the organizer of the memorial.

Even though a demolition date hasn’t been set, it’s too late to make a push to preserve the building, Pfiffner said. It’s been badly damaged from years of neglect. But she hopes the memorial service will allow people who had a connection to the building — in any of its incarnations as a church, a rental property or a dance academy — to share memorials and appreciations. She said she hopes that helps bring attention to the need in Stevens Point and elsewhere to preserve historically important buildings.

“I’ve watched numerous buildings come and go,” she said. “Some of them are more heartbreaking than others. A building isn’t always the building — sometimes it’s the story that people attach to that building that makes it so important to them.”

Just blocks away from the Trinity Lutheran Church, an effort to rehab a historic downtown theater lasted for decades before city inspectors in 2019 found it presented hazards to other downtown buildings and ordered it razed. The city ended up demolishing most of the back end of that building, but preserved the facade and parts of the front of the building. A local developer later purchased it with plans to create an event space. In fact, that company will claim some materials from the Trinity Lutheran Church and incorporate them into its plans.

Debates about old buildings aren’t unique to Stevens Point. In nearby Biron, the paper company ND Paper informed local leaders late last year that the company wants to sell a historic “white house” that abuts the mill to the city and move it off ND Paper’s property. In Merrill, the Ascension health system in early 2021 demolished a historic but decaying mansion once owned by city founder T.B. Scott. And La Crosse’s Historic Preservation Commission last year published a list of the city’s 10 most endangered places.

In December, Pfiffner and local designer Barry Calnan took 360-degree images of the building as a way of preserving its history. Like the memorial service, Pfiffner said that’s an important part of the preservation efforts.

“There’s many different aspects of preservation,” Pfiffner said. “People feel like it very much has to do with the architectural, physical part of it. But even … making that scan: That is historic preservation. We’re preserving the idea and the thought, and people will see that.”

The celebration of the Trinity Lutheran Church building will be at 1 p.m. Sunday outside the building at 1700 Strongs Ave. in Stevens Point, followed by a reception.