Looking up with UPH

Though, according to Matthew J. Kopans, UPH’s Managing Director, you should look up the next time you walk by the building – the new louvers make a big difference on the bell tower.

When the restoration is complete, the building will be a downtown cultural venue able to draw artists and performance groups that would usually only come to cities like Albany or New York City, said Kopans. The site will also be open for weddings, gatherings and lectures. Using the venue for other events will help defray the cost of holding performances, Kopans notes, ideally keeping the building as a self-sufficient performance space.

“I think Saratoga has been lacking a cultural venue like this in the downtown,” said Kopans. Not to mention, he points out, the hall will serve as a natural connection from Broadway to the Art District on Beekman.

The restoration work at the building has been ongoing since the early 2000s, led by a dedicated group of volunteers, who have put countless hours into work and fundraising to restore the 1871 building to its original luster.

In 2000, Skidmore Professor Tom Lewis and Jeff Pfeil, president of Pfeil & Co., began meeting with Universal Baptist Church representatives to figure out what could be done to save the building. Lewis currently serves as president of the Preservation Foundation, a group formed to save and develop the building. Pfeil, the group’s original president now serves as vice president for construction.

“I knew that Saratoga would be poorer if the community just let the building fall – and that was a possibility then,” said Lewis.“I also knew that the Hall has superb acoustics, certainly the best for miles around, and that it could become a premierperformance hall.”

“This Hall guarantees that Saratoga Springs will continue to be in the forefront of cultural and economic development in the coming years. I can hear great concerts; I can see wonderful modern dance performances, I can hear great lectures and readings; I can see weddings and dances and benefits; I can see all these events in the near future and I know that all Saratoga will be richer for them.”

The building, originally built in 1871 by the Methodist-Episcopal Church to replace a smaller church structure that was there, is considered by architectural historians as one of the earliest and finest examples of High Victorian Gothic architecture in the country.

The Methodist-Episcopal church relocated in the 1960s leaving the building empty until the Universal Baptist Church took it over in 1976. Over the years, the building fell into disrepair and the small congregation couldn’t handle the repairs on their own. In 2002, after talking with the Preservation Foundation, an arrangement was made in which the foundation would gain control of the building while the congregation would retain a small chapel on the first floor to continue worship there.

Ultimately, the UPH will contain the chapel and two sites for events, the community room, which will hold groups between 110 and 150, and the upstairs grand chapel, which will hold up to 700 people. The main chapel will retain flexible seating, so as to be able to cater to all events, from wedding receptions to concerts and dance performances.

Most of the work so far is not visible from the outside, instead focusing on reinforcing the building’s structural integrity, including replacing seven roof tresses, three of which had been completely rotted out from water damage. When the tresses originally collapsed, several panels of decorative woodwork were destroyed. Joseph Murphy, one of the UPH’s regular construction staff, researched 19th century tools and recreated each piece as it would originally have been carved.

Work on the building has been proceeding “slowly and responsibly,” and is limited by the project’s funding, says Kopans, who noted the entire project will cost about $4 million. Kopans said the Foundation’s goal is to have the building 100 percent up and running by the end of next summer.

For more information or to volunteer, logon to www.Universal

PreservationHall.org or call Matthew Kopans at 584-2627.