The purchase includes the Mt. Zion House of Prayer and its parking lot on Tilton Avenue. (Photo by John T. Ward. Click to enlarge.)
By JOHN T. WARD
Red Bank-based Lunch Break, already in the midst of a massive facilities expansion, may build a residential project on the site of a West Side church.
The social services organization is looking into using the Mt. Zion House of Prayer‘s property to provide housing for the homeless, Gwen Love, Lunch Break’s executive director, told redbankgreen last week.
Completion of the deal would also mean the end of more than a century of worship on the site.
A Google Maps view of the church property and parking lot, above. Below, Lunch Break executive director Gwen Love in April, 2022. (Photo below by John T. Ward. Click to enlarge.)
Lunch Break is under contract to buy the property at 170-172 Catherine Street, according to a document filed last week with the Monmouth County Clerk.
The deal includes the house of worship itself, located on a bend in the road, and a 22-car parking lot, at 8 Tilton Avenue. The sale price was not disclosed, but a recent listing for had the church asking $977,100 for the two lots.
Love said Lunch Break has no firm plans for the sites yet.
“We’re working with a team to figure out what we want to do there, actually,” she said Thursday. “We’re just looking to see what would be the most appropriate fit there,” both in terms of the organization’s needs and the neighborhood’s, she said.
Residential construction is under consideration to help address homelessness and housing insecurity, Love said. Lunch Break merged with Family Promise, a nonprofit housing assistance nonprofit, in early 2022.
“It’s really related to the homeless families we’re serving now,” she said. “Whether it’s going to be individual homes or apartments, we don’t know. Right now we’re exploring everything. Nothing is off the table.”
Mt. Zion Pastor Randy McNeil could not be reached for comment last week about the reasons for the sale and the congregation’s future.
The church does not own the house located to its west, between the sanctuary and parking lot, according to tax records. A second house just east of the church, also owned separately, is under contract to a buyer unrelated to Lunch Break, records indicate. Love said her organization looked into acquiring it, but at that point it was already under contract.
The church property, which is included on the borough’s historic addresses inventory, has been used for religious purposes for generations. In 1891, Mrs. E.M. Durham, “a prominent member of Trinity Episcopal Church,” built a chapel there as a memorial to her son, Thomas Knight Durham, a church organist who died while canoeing in the North Shrewsbury River the year before, according to the Red Bank Register.
Overlooking the spot where the young Durham died, the Gothic-style sanctuary was named “St. Thomas’ Memorial Chapel,” the Register reported. But it got little use in the following years.
In 1907, “a group of local Black Episcopalians successfully petitioned Bishop Scarborough to use the vacant chapel for worship services that they had previously been holding in one another’s homes,” according to the website of what’s now St. Thomas Episcopal Church.
Mrs. Durham deeded the property, debt-free, to the new congregation a year later, according to local historian Randall Gabrielan.
Mt. Zion House of Prayer took over the property in 1952, one year after St. Thomas moved to its present location at East Sunset Avenue and Bridge Avenue. The 1891 chapel was demolished and replaced with the present structure in 1998, borough records show.
Now in its 40th year, Lunch Break is in the midst of a $12 million remodeling of its Drs. James Parker Boulevard home facility that will nearly triple the square footage. Construction is tentatively expected to be completed by November, Love said.
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