On the corner of Montgomery and East Jefferson Streets stands First Baptist Church, a massive edifice that has prevailed on that corner since 1914. First Baptist Church was established by consolidating First Baptist Church, the oldest church in Syracuse, originally located on the northwest corner of West Genesee and North Franklin Streets, with Central Baptist Church on June 1, 1910. The consolidated congregations resulted in erecting a larger building on Central Baptist’s site at 215 East Jefferson St. The two congregations were excited about the prospect of combining their two churches. 

“The work of pastor and people during these four years from 1910 to 1914 was remarkable in many respects and the example of two strong, modern, down-town churches, having an aggregate membership of over 1,700 persons combining for a greater, more aggressive and triumphant work than could be accomplished by either or both alone has challenged the attention of the religious world,” stated the dedication pamphlet in 1914. 

The congregation established a building committee to design and construct the new church building. The committee’s desire was to build “an imposing and lofty building so that it would not sink into insignificance as tall buildings, characteristic of modern cities, might rise around it.” To create such a building, the congregation contemplated a building that would also generate income. As a result, the committee recommended a building that would be six stories tall, including a basement. The first two floors were dedicated to church activities and the three upper floors consisting of rental living space, were designed to augment rooms already rented by the contiguous Syracuse YMCA. 

Architects from around the eastern U.S. submitted building designs and the committee selected Gordon A. Wright, a Syracuse architect, to formally design the new church. The building’s exterior and interior design is English Gothic. Its central tower mimics the tower at the Canterbury Cathedral, one of the oldest and most-famous structures in England. Access to the auditorium was designed from both East Jefferson and Montgomery Streets. The design also provided for very satisfactory acoustics, especially for the speaker, as well as the organ, which was designed and built specifically for the auditorium. The construction cost of the building was $300,000 in 1914 (about $8.2 million today). The organ cost an additional $25,000 (about $685,000 now). The building was constructed with fireproof material and its air quality was controlled via a system for fresh-air intake and diffusion that refreshed the building’s air quality every 10 minutes. 

The church’s auditorium featured semi-circular seating facing the pulpit, the organ, and its two sections of pipes, and stained-glass windows depicting Biblical scenes arranged in an arch configuration. The auditorium’s acoustics featured the most modern sound engineering known in the early 20th century. The audience, seats, and floor absorbed sound waves before they had a chance to reverberate or echo. The auditorium also included large quantities of wood, a naturally resonating material that reduced echoes and provided excellent sound emanation from the pulpit at one end of the auditorium to the farthest point out.

The church’s 120 rental or dormitory rooms, located on the fourth through sixth floors, known as the Mizpah Inn, were connected to the YMCA via enclosed bridges on each floor. Each dormitory room included a bed, dresser, chairs, rugs, curtains, and a sink with hot and cold water. Each floor also included a general toilet and shower room; five rooms on each floor were connected with private baths. The rooms also included steam heat and were cooled with a transom window located above each room door. Situated on the roof was a separate five-room suite originally designed to accommodate a building superintendent. The dormitory rooms were supervised by a separate board of trustees. A handbill published in the early 1930s advertised the Mizpah Inn as “The Inn Beautiful,” which “places the Mizpah in the front ranks of fine hotels in the United States.” First Baptist Church later became known as the church with a hotel above it. 

The church also included other modern features such as an electric elevator system running from the basement to the sixth floor with stops on each floor, pay telephones, and a cleaning and vacuuming system comprised of sweeping machines. The basement contained a large banquet hall with kitchen facilities that could accommodate up to 600 diners and offered restaurant services to those staying at the Mizpah Inn. 

Wherever possible, the building committee employed the services of Onondaga County contractors. The general contractors included O’Connor Brothers (stone masons) and Robert Montgomery (carpenters), Houser Elevator Company, Edward Joy Company (electrical wiring), Stearns & Sons (marble and tile), E.J. Murnane & Bro. (painting and decorating), and The Jakway Water Cone Vacuum Cleaner Co. (cleaning system).

The church congregation took on a large debt to build the new First Baptist Church. When First Baptist commemorated its Silver Anniversary, 25 years later in 1939, the church property was valued at $700,000 (almost $14 million today), but after making necessary repairs and some alterations, the congregation still owed $277,000 (worth about $5.5 million now). 

In 1946, First Baptist Church celebrated 125 years since its founding in 1821 as the first organized church in Syracuse — 125 members of the congregation presented a pageant recalling the first days of the nascent church. The pastor at the time, Dr. Edwin Dahlberg, recollected some of the high and low points of the church’s history up to 1946. Dahlberg exclaimed, “As God led us in the past so He will lead us in the future. If our fathers could fill in mudholes, lower the lake, conquer plague and establish the city, so it is possible for us to abolish war, put religious education on a firm basis and establish Christian brotherhood.”

The hotel continued to thrive as well. Help-wanted ads routinely appeared in the Syracuse newspapers advertising for a variety of hotel and restaurant staff: cooks, porters, maids, wait staff, bus boys, clerks, and other positions. The hotel’s restaurant served meals to local citizens, hotel guests, and company officials who held dinner meetings at the restaurant. Along with operating the restaurant, First Baptist Church continued to rent rooms on the upper floors to long-term boarders. Several names appearing in the Syracuse newspapers from the 1940s into the 1960s listed their home addresses as the Mizpah Hotel, including some renters who were arrested for running afoul of the law. The church maintained the five-room penthouse suite on the roof of the building, later making it available for various ministers’ accommodations. 

By 1968, First Baptist Church had converted the Mizpah Inn into a home for girls and the restaurant had converted to a coffee house known as the Circuit, a place where teens could play music and dance, a safe haven from the temptation of illicit drugs. The Mizpah Inn changed its name to the Mizpah Tower during the following year in 1969. In 1971, First Baptist Church celebrated its 150th anniversary. Mizpah Tower now housed young women on the fifth and sixth floors, while still retaining eight apartments on the fourth floor mostly for older residents; a young family resided in the penthouse. In the late 1970s, Pastor Raymond Jennings declared that the church operated the women’s residence each year at a financial loss. In 1983, the congregation tried to sell the church to reduce its financial burden, but to no avail. 

First Baptist Church continued to operate the church and other facilities until the congregation sold the downtown church building in the spring of 1988. The church that once attracted 1,500 to 2,000 Sunday attendees had dwindled down to about 40. Those faithful members voted to purchase 27 acres in Jamesville where they built a new First Baptist Church, completed in 1990. Some of those original 40 members who migrated from downtown Syracuse to Jamesville are still active in the new church today. The thriving congregation in Jamesville shares its building with a Korean congregation, a partnership begun more than 12 years ago. 

The downtown church building continued its metamorphosis by becoming Symphony Hall at Columbus Center in 1989. Paul Anderson and his Albany–based partner, Rudolf Paulsen, known as the Anderson Company (later, Jefferson Montgomery Associates), purchased the building in August 1988 with plans to convert the former church and hotel into concert and small-business space. After buying the building for $600,000, Anderson and Paulsen envisioned spending an additional 

$3 million on their renovation. At the time, Anderson believed that the church’s location was its greatest selling point and sought tax breaks and a loan of $3.5 million to $4 million from the Syracuse Industrial Development Agency (SIDA) to accomplish his renovation goal. In November 1989, SIDA awarded the Anderson Company a $74,000 tax break to spur the renovation project. In August 1990, the project received an economic boost of $200,000 from New York State’s Urban Cultural Park program. The following January, Columbus Center was advertising an open house at the Mizpah Lounges and Galleries to showcase local author and artist offerings. Along with presenting concerts in the building’s auditorium, local theatrical productions also were staged there until October 1994. Discussions began in 1997 with the Syracuse City School District to renovate the Metropolitan School for the Arts (MSA), located in the former Masonic Temple on Montgomery Street, and Columbus Center, as part of a $30 million expansion plan to offer middle-school and high-school students’ additional space for visual & performing and technological-arts programs known as Avenue of the Arts. 

But the fate of both Columbus Center and the Avenue of the Arts soon came crashing down. A glut of downtown office space in the late 1990s eliminated plans to create the small-business space on the building’s upper floors and the building’s owner defaulted on paying to the city almost $471,000 in back taxes. So, in February 1998, the city seized Columbus Center and, in June, abandoned plans for the Avenue of the Arts educational project. That July, thieves stole 43 stained-glass panes in the now-vacant building. At the time, the windows’ value ranged from $116,000 to $193,000. The stolen windows only exacerbated damage to a building already vulnerable to water damage from roof leaks.

In 2003, there was another attempt to attract a developer to rehabilitate the now-dilapidated city-owned building. At the time, the renovation cost was estimated at $17 million. An out-of-town development group approached city officials with a renovation plan and another church congregation looked at the building. Although the building had suffered much interior damage, its exterior remained solid.

First Baptist Church changed ownership again in 2005 when Ben Errez of Bellevue, Washington — representing Syracuse Bangkok, LLC — bought the building for $27,500. Errez’s project for converting the building into a 101-room hotel stalled for the next several years and, when nothing happened, the city seized the property again in 2013 and immediately sold it to attorney Thomas Cerio for $30,000. At the time, Cerio announced his plan to renovate the church building into a mixed-use facility with a banquet hall, a coffee shop, hotel or office space, and several large apartments. In a Post-Standard newspaper article two years later, Cerio again mentioned his desire to convert the former church building for residential and commercial purposes. Cerio was quoted in the article as saying, “I think there’s a lot of potential there. It’s right in the middle of everything that’s going on.”

The former First Baptist Church is listed on the Preservation Association of Central New York’s list of “Eight that Can’t Wait,” citing the dire need to rehabilitate the colossal structure at 215 East Jefferson St. and desperately try to avoid demolishing the building, a proposal first presented by the city back in 1993.

Thomas Cerio has indeed begun rehabilitating the building. To the casual observer looking at the building’s exterior, it does not appear that much renovation work is happening. But looks can be deceiving. Cerio is unobtrusively refurbishing the building’s interior. So, as we approach 2022, there is still hope for revitalizing the once-vibrant church, restaurant, hotel, dormitory, and music center.           

Thomas Hunter is the curator of collections at the Onondaga Historical Association (OHA) (www.cnyhistory.org), located at 321 Montgomery St. in Syracuse.