A decade or so ago, my band mate and a few other folk musicians purchased an old temple in Cumberland, RI. After initial estimates of 75k for renovations, they are 200k in and they've done countless hours of free labor.
The result? Talisk, Alasdair Fraser, and Hanneke Cassel are all playing there this spring...three of my musical idols!
Let's restore and repair our great spaces, the value and community is incredible! Blackstone River Theater is a great example of the cultural value of this investment.
Wow that takes me back. In Southwestern Ontario the Odd Fellows and Freemason halls were often rented out by us as teenagers and young adults for shows.
That said, we were also often kicked out of them (bunch of dumb, loud kids were we) and did something of a circle between the Masons, Odd Fellows, Shriners, Kinsmen's, and other community halls and then back again over the years.
A few guys from Brantford (ON) eventually got sick of getting kicked out and set up a non-profit that was a little more raw and ragged than your friends' efforts, but it was surely equal of passion! [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ford_Plant]
It was a great time...
Buying one of those halls was a totally prescient move!
There's a major venue downtown Toronto that was once a YMCA, aptly named The Great Hall that sounds similar in operation (though I believe it's for-profit?) [https://www.thegreathall.ca/history/]
It's great to hear that Cumberland is working as a venue! I would expect a venue in Cumberland to have trouble competing with those in Fall River (MA), Worcester (MA), and Providence (RI). My impression of Cumberland has always been that it's in the middle of nowhere, despite maps clearly showing that it's not.
EDIT: I'm really glad you mentioned that place. I just looked at their current lineup [0], and I'm actually thinking about catching some of the performances. Thanks!
Yes! Can anyone comment on how tough it'd be for the BRT to have an e-reservation system for tickets? Right now, you have to call, leave a message, then they have to call back and confirm...it's not ideal.
The misinformation about Masonry in the article is very unfortunate. The Freemasons are not a “secret organization” — they are organization of secrets. Big difference. Also, this building isn’t a temple, they’re referred to as lodges. I can go on...
The Masons are one of the largest fundraising organizations in the world, who started and fund the Shriners Hospitals, as an example.
Would have preferred to see a more positive and realistic perspective on the Freemasonry.
Lodge and Temple in informal usage are interchangeable, but formally the Lodge is the organizational subunit and the Temple is the Lodge's meeting space.
Sign outside the building says "Masonic temple". Not sure if it is original. I'd assume that the lodge is organizational unit, while temple is a building. Wiki seems to agree.
"A Masonic Temple or Masonic Hall is, within Freemasonry, the room or edifice where a Masonic Lodge meets"
There are a couple of interesting looking Freemason facilities in the Washington, DC, area. I keep meaning to take the tours. My great-grandfather was a 33rd degree Mason. He was the whole classic stereotype: a civil engineer of Scottish descent!
My uncle was a 33rd Deg FreeMason also. I learned this at his funeral... He served in 3 wars, WW2, Korea, & Vietnam.
Is it correct that to be considered for membership, you must approach a member? But they cannot approach you and try to sell you on it?
One uncommonly spoken requirement of Freemasonry membership is the belief in a Supreme Creator/Higher Power. Not strictly Christianity either, but really any Great Creator of the Universe. This would cause Freemasonry to be a non-starter with a considerable number of HN readers (atheists, specifically.)
Took a tour of one of the big ones there recently. It was quite strange with respect to the content of the library (pretty much the only place you are allowed to go if not on a guided tour) and the inordinate amount of Ben Franklin ephemera.
The line is actually closer to "we're not a secret society, we're a society with secrets."
Basically, it means that we're not a shadow organization that cloaks all it does in secrecy. Rather, we are a public organization that guards some internal knowledge behind closed doors and cyphers.
This euphemism makes it look like it is a lot more transparent this way, but it isn't really if secrets are being guarded from the outside world. The only different thing is that it not being a shadow organization there's a possibility one can join its ranks.
I don't think they named the "Secret Service" based on its existence being kept secret either - rather, their business is secret. I don't think that was a goal considering how avidly they plaster Masonry symbols everywhere - including on their temples
I'm genuinely curious: may you please provide more information about how it was "undercover"? None of the references I've found suggest that knowledge of its existence was kept under wraps at the time of its founding in 1865[1] - it was merely the federal agency responsible for countering counterfeit currency, and that doesn't require secrecy.
I suspect the whole 007-like mystique only arose much later - after it was tasked with protecting the president in 1901/2
1. not-so-fun-fact: Lincoln was assassinated while the legislation to create the USSS was awaiting his signature on his desk
They're publicly well known, and as far as I'm aware they don't have any rules against telling people you're a member. Many of their temples/lodges/whatever you want to call them are identified somewhere on the facade (Freemasons' Hall in Edinburgh for example is available for hire as an event space).
However, what they do and talk about within the lodge is secret.
I'm not a secret person, I'm a person with secrets. I exist and live a life with plenty of people knowing my name but I don't broadcast every single little thing. I keep some things secret.
(OK, I'm kinda secret here, because I'm not going to give anyone my email address. But I don't adopt a pseudonym in the physical world.)
Consider the references to ghosts later in the article, you shouldn't be surprised that they play up the "spooky" aspect. No one benefits from telling the simple truth that it's just a fairly large community center.
Freemasonry isn't a religion - in fact, religious discussion is often banned within freemasonry groups.
"Freemasonry exhibits many cult-like characteristics and thus probably is a cult" is a fairly substantive claim, and my intention isn't to "flamebait", but to draw attention and awareness to how cults operate and how to identify them - a matter of personal importance to me, as people close to me have been involved in cults and harmed by them.
Must get very cold in the winters-- I can't imagine what it would cost to heat most of that space. I'm also impressed at how permissive the local zoning rules are. I guess in parts of the country that are struggling economically and seeing population declines, they can't be too difficult. The property taxes are probably super low as well given then very low purchase price.
"It’s not bad at all!! We have 6 separate central a/c units and 8 separate central heating units. We can pick & choose what parts of the building to heat/cool and to varying temperatures. Our highest gas bill this past winter was $330 and that included almost an entire month of subzero temperatures. The building is incredibly well insulated."
Wow, that's awesome! Obviously anytime someone looks at this they wanna get cynical immediately (as I did). One thing I'm curious about is the property taxes. I could find it online if I really wanted to so I truly wonder if they took that into consideration. Also the upkeep. If I were them, I would try to rent out a portion of it and then eventually turn it into a rental property.
A lot of conversions wind up with heating problems. Especially converted warehouses or industrial garages. One solution are to create cubby like warm rooms, or go Asian and use kotatsus, which is how I handled it in southern China (not a conversion, but no indoor heat meant the same thing). Still sucks. These things work better in milder climates like the LA or the Bay Area.
Strangely no one has brought up cleaning, that place must accumulate a lot of dust. I would assume they hire cleaners but I have no idea what that would cost.
Rooms or floors that don't get used don't need to be cleaned very often. Dust accumulation is basically nonexistent in the absence of human activity. If the building uses anything other than forced hot air for heating the dust accumulation will be lesser still.
A couple janitor would have a commercial building that size cleaned in a night of work. There's no reason the owners can't use the same techniques one Saturday a month.
I'm not going to lie, the very first thing i thought about was the rates they'd be paying. And the utilities any problem they have is at a commercial scale.
I'd be interesting to see what their insurance looks like too.
This is what I was thinking about. When I was looking around for my first home, I definitely fantasized about buying some big, old building that was cheap/in need of work but still livable (for some definitions of livable...basically I don't mind if it's grungy for a couple of years while I work on it).
Unfortunately, even in my city (which is not in good financial shape) there weren't too many of these legally zoned for residence. Sure there are the old warehouses and de facto "lofts" where artists and crust punks live off the radar or with a wink and a grin (suuuuure, you're just working there and not living there...) but most of the big places were either in such poor shape I couldn't really consider living there or not legal to use as a residence.
On top of that, even the ones in really bad shape were selling for $200k or more. For someone with a $400k budget and somewhere else to live for a year that's fine because you can get the whole thing gutted and renovated. For someone like me with a $200-250k budget it was a no-go. Any cool "fixer uppers" I found in the $100-150k range were bought for cash within a few days of listing--prime targets for cash-rich developers who can clean them up and flip for profit.
In the end I compromised and found a place for $170k that had not been maintained, still needs loads of work, but was livable once I got all of the trash and cat stank out of the place. It's a reasonably large (though nothing like the Mason Lodge) 100-ish year old townhouse and I've been slowly renovating and repairing over the past couple of years.
Even then, it was difficult to get homeowner's insurance. My initial provider dropped me as soon as they found out I was working on it while living in it. Unless I could show them a timeline and refer them to a general contractor (who wasn't me learning as I went along) they didn't want the risk. Ended up getting some community insurance that wasn't nearly as expensive as whatever my lender would've forced on me but also wasn't too much worse than a "traditional" provider.
Still loads of frustration, it will take forever at the rate I'm going just getting in a day or two per week of real work. But I must be a glutton for punishment because I still think it's cooler than just taking out a bigger loan for something that was already renovated by someone else. At the very least, I can pay for supplies and hire contractors when I have the funds, but I'm not on the hook for a higher mortgage payment every month if some unforeseen circumstance leaves money temporarily tight.
And it's pretty cool learning by faking it until I make it. I'm still no craftsman but I'm a lot better at some of this stuff than I was a few years ago. Maybe in another few years I'll be vaguely competent!
I had a wealthy relative who carried her bag with her so she wouldn't have to travel from one side of her house to the other just to get something, and if I lived at this former temple I'd do the same.
"Other times, the children use the [movie] room to play hide and seek, and sometimes they invite the 15 to 20 other kids in the neighborhood over to have a Nerf-gun fight."
Tangentially related, anyone in the PNW who doesn’t already know about McMenamins should check out their hotels. They mostly buy old historic buildings and remodel them as hotels/restaurants/pubs/etc. while maintaining interesting aspects of the building histories.
E.g. we have stayed at the Kennedy School in Portland where our room was a converted class room.
I discovered them a couple of years ago when I went to see a movie (The Greatest Showman) at McMenamins in Centralia, WA. Wow. I twas like going back in time. Oddly, one of my favorite things was the bathroom. Original porcelain from the 1920's or so, and the urinals didn't flush. Instead, wastewater from the sink drained into the urinals and flushed them. Very efficient!
I feel like professionals should have completed this job. The picture of the bathroom is really disheartening. All the pipes are industrial looking and the "taps" are ball valves. The sink is a bucket and the tub is a cattle/agricultural wash basin.
I suspect the local historical preservation society has limits on the exterior of old buildings but can't do anything about the interior work.
> I suspect the local historical preservation society has limits on the exterior of old buildings but can't do anything about the interior work.
As they should. This building is better off renovated to the owners' tastes than rotting, which is what would surely happen if a preservation society tried to dictate interior changes.
The bathroom is pretty bad, but the other renovated rooms are decent. The kitchen looks great, the kids room is acceptable, and the library is very classy, although I think the desk may be facing the wrong way...
The kids room looked like an amazing setup, desk + foosball + a kick ass built-in lofted bed? My inner child was thinking of all that space for the activities
I wonder how they heat the place; Indiana ain't the Bay Area.
I used to know a guy who rented part of the Alameda former masonic lodge. The architecture was amazing. The guy who bought it got a real steal (I think during the 2000 downturn).
They probably heat it selectively and still pay a lot in utilities. One of the photos of stairs looks like it has a fairly small HVAC so there are likely multiple systems for the whole building.
One of the tricky things with a project like this is that banks are very leery of underwriting a mortgage on something that isn't a residence (I ran into this when I briefly flirted with buying an old fire station). Usually the best you can do is a construction loan at a fairly high interest rate.
But if you have California equity and are buying at Rust Belt prices (as in this case) you can just pay cash.
I think the point may just be that the price was pretty aggressive, not that it should necessarily be done.
I was also wondering if the pipe organ works, or is close to working. I don't even have an estimate of what that might be worth but it wouldn't surprise me that it alone would be more than what they paid for the place. Again, I'm not saying I would want them to do that, just that that may be pretty valuable on its own.
But on the flip side, I can see why they had a hard time finding a buyer. Even were it ready to live in on day one, it would be a project home nevertheless, just to find something to do with the space. You can get similar problems when selling a church; if there isn't another organization of a similar size and similar needs ready to move in, who is really going to buy it, especially for larger churches?
In Ontario, one of the more popular things to do is convert one room schoolhouses into homes. The same is done with churches, so it makes sense that former fraternity assets are as well.
These organizations used to form the fabric of a civil society that persisted underneath the volatility of governments and economic concerns. The liberal aspect of the group created neutral ground for people with different religious convictions to form a civil community outside their churches and temples.
When you look at the historical impact of that organization, the best summary I've heard is it has served as a check on hegemony, as the villains of history seem to be the ones most concerned about them.
I nearly did the same thing in my town. Bit more expensive, but there was a roughly 18k-sqft old fraternity house in town. My wife and I considered purchasing it at $400k, we put an offer in at $350k, but it was declined.
Another group bought ($390k) it and completed a remodel (estimated $180k) and it's now worth ~$1.25m and it's beautiful. Kind of regret not purchasing it, but it just wasn't in the cards at that price.
You can get wall units in some select areas and that should take care of things. If they previously had a house in San Diego they probably aren't hurting financially. I'm jealous of all the space, it almost seems like too much without putting in a gymnasium and skate park.
> If they previously had a house in San Diego they probably aren't hurting financially.
That's not necessarily true, it really depends on when they bought their home. Housing prices in California have nearly quadrupled in the last two decades. Families that could afford a house in the 2000s are priced out of the market today. If you entered at the right time you could be paying more in property taxes than mortgage, or living paycheck to paycheck with a three figure salary.
The article says they bought it outright and used the equity from the sale of their CA home to fund the initial remodeling costs, and they've put an additional $40k into it. The reddit post says they sold their home in San Diego for $700k, which at that price is a sub 2000 sq ft ranch.
Just looking at the photos in the article, there don't appear to be hundreds of thousands of dollars in renovations. In fact most of the living spaces shown appear to have been done on a budget. So if we assume the kitchen was the additional $40k in renovation costs, we can assume they didn't get all that much out of their house in San Diego. If I had to hazard a guess, I'd say $150k.
There's some commentary here and with the focus on this article being an old empty temple. Are there a lot of these abandoned temples around? Are these fraternities in decline or something? What was the height of their popularity?
Historically the peaks of Freemasonry in America were around the time of the revolutionary war, civil war, and two world wars. Being a fraternity first and foremost - soldiers abroad found brotherhood and companionship together in freemasonry - their numbers soared around this time as new initiates joined. Since the 70's or so the fraternity has seen a steady decline of membership not to dissimilar to the decline of religious institutions.
I had a similar opportunity when I last moved, but the giant historic downtown structure was over a million dollars, and had some visible deterioration that made me think I'd spend another million in repairs.
It also occupied almost the entire plot of land, which for that downtown area, was unusual.
On the other hand, if I bought it, I'd have beachfront property in about 50-100 years once the ice caps melt!
> They bought it in full for $89,000, so they do not have a mortgage and are debt-free after using the money they got from selling their San Diego home. The equity they earned from that sale funded most of the up-front remodel costs at the temple.
I suppose that says something about California real estate prices.
Toronto has a building [1] of a very similar size and internal layout that is used as a concert venue and offices for some IT company with conspicuously generic name. The list of people that performed there looks like Rock-n-Roll Hall of fame and it was one of the most entertaining places to visit during Doors Open Toronto. During the visit I realized that graffiti-style artwork inside was done by someone I know.
The buyer says that the house seems "haunted" and that there are "paranormal activities". Haunted houses typically have lower values on the housing market, as demonstrated by horror movies like The Shining, etc. All jokes aside, it would've been better to convert it for commercial use, such as an office, rather than for it to be a residential unit, since all that empty space seems to be wasted.
I grew up in that part of the world and I can safely say nobody there has $89K laying around to make a purchase of this type (renovations aside, imagine heating the place). The absence of qualified buyers drive prices around there. People who have never been to the rural areas of the midwest simply have no perspective on the economics of that region. Its not impossible that the equity from their San Diego home sale made them the richest people in the county (I don't recall the town being mentioned in the article).
That article has a link to the family blog, which has a photo of a WWII postcard they found in the building (with the address, confirmed with Google Street View).
That's not even rural Indiana. It's a town within a 500,000 person metro area and about a 25 minute drive from the downtown of the central city, complete with skyscrapers and everything. The town itself has a very solid looking (streetview) walkable downtown area. I looked on Zillow and fixer-upper houses within a few blocks of this building are listed for $35,000 to $90,000. Really nice, immaculate homes in the area appear to sell for $150,000 or so.
My guess is that $89,000 is right on target for this area, and I'd bet they spend multiples of that on restoration.
Yeah but this isn't a home. Most people don't want to buy a 20k masonic template and live it in. Given what the upkeep must be, your most likely buyers probably want to rent out the space to businesses. So it's priced according to what the demand is, which is apparently small.
> California Masonic membership is open to men age 18 or older who meet the qualifications and standards of character and intention, and who believe in a Supreme Being
The result? Talisk, Alasdair Fraser, and Hanneke Cassel are all playing there this spring...three of my musical idols!
Let's restore and repair our great spaces, the value and community is incredible! Blackstone River Theater is a great example of the cultural value of this investment.