2023 Year-End Review: Shiloh Baptist Church (Tarrytown, NY)
On MLK Day, we shared this announcement on our Instagram page:
Kicking off wrkSHap kiloWatt’s 2023 Year in Review: Shiloh Baptist Church of Tarrytown, NY
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On this day of reflection about Martin Luther King, Jr. and the overall legacy of the Civil Rights Movement, wrkSHap kiloWatt honors one of its New York clients, Shiloh Baptist Church in Tarrytown, NY and its local advocacy that pre-dated the Movement.
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Since its founding in 1885 by Black residents of Tarrytown and its neighbors, Shiloh Baptist Church has had an all-Black congregation. It is the second oldest church for the African American community of Tarrytown and Sleepy Hollow.
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Across the US, the Black church, as an institution, has a history of social justice. When the congregation founded Shiloh, there was high racial tension in the Tarrytown area and the country in general. A part of Shiloh’s history includes holding public meetings in the early 1900s for the Colored Protective League to organize for the protection, safety, and quality of life for Black people.
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This League had the word “protective” in it because, at the time, Black people needed protection from racially-motivated harassment from their White neighbors and government in Tarrytown and North Tarrytown areas.
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And, fun fact: Shiloh Baptist Church is the result of an adaptive reuse project. From 1884 to 1890, the building was Smith’s Opera House, one of the first “public houses” of Tarrytown. The congregation completed church renovations in 1892. For a town the size of Tarrytown, an opera house to church conversion was quite unusual at that time.
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Shiloh Baptist Church is a Tarrytown local landmark and a recent recipient of a Sacred Sites grant from the New York Landmarks Conservancy.
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Thanks to a referral from the New York Landmarks Conservancy (@nylandmarks), in 2023, wrkSHap kiloWatt prepared a Feasibility Study for a Preservation Plan for the congregation. The Study included assembling a team of architects, engineers, and designers, developing the scope of work, and developing the project budget and schedule estimates.
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Shiloh Baptist Church was a finalist for the National Trust for Historic Preservation’s 2024 Preserving Black Churches Grant. wrkSHap kiloWatt worked with Shiloh’s Reverend to complete the grant application. Congratulations to all of the 2024 grant recipients!
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wrkSHap kiloWatt is a Black woman-owned and operated historic preservation studio. It is home to Black in Historic Preservation (@blackinhistpres), (un)Redact the Facts (@unredacthefacts), and Beyond Integrity in (X) (@beyond.integrity).