The Missing Bell

This is the corner of 48th Street, Baltimore Avenue, ans Florence Avenue, very near my home. It was a very pleasant evening and I went out on my bike looking for a catless blip. I chose this in part for the colors in the sky, partly to follow Kendall's "One Street" challenge, and to re-tell a little story I know.

Around a dozen years ago a good friend of mine helped to raise hundreds of thousands of dollars to restore Calvary Methodist Church, which dominates the intersection and serves as a major center of the neighborhood's activity. I've blipped it inside and out many times. The lines of its roof and tower often bring to mind asound I have never heard.

If memory serves, the church was built in 1903. Until the late 1950s this was an affluent section, and then there were lean times until the 1990s, when I saw everything restored. One of many things in the Calvary building that was sorely neglected for decades was the bell which earlier had called worshipers to worship from up in the main tower. For decades it was stored in a shed on the roof (which I believe is part of the small, domed structure you see behind it). By the time renovations got underway, only a few people were still involved with the church who remembered that there had ever been a bell. Supposedly it was large and heavy with some sort of decorative designs in the casting.

During the time when the roof was being completely replaced, there was a motorized pulley on the Baltimore Avenue side, and the workmen would lower the debris and lift up the new materials as the job progressed. When it was all done, everyone was pleased. Then someone noticed that there was no bell in the shed, nor anywhere else in the church. Evidently it had been stolen by means of the pulley.

I heard about it through my friend and I expressed hope that it could be located, but there was no time to waste in looking for who took it and where it went (possibly sold to a collector or to another church; more likely sold for scrap metal). I was disappointed when I learned that the church leaders had decided not to investigate, but rather to just forget about the bell. I was asked to be discreet on the subject.

I lived in Rome for a year of university life, and I remember the sounds of many church bells filling the air on Sunday mornings, throughout the city. Most people, religious or not, liked this. I don't think this missing bell would have been as popular had it been re-hung, then rung & rung & rung, but it's awful that such a unique item was lost, just when it was time to come back to life.