DOORS OPEN MILWAUKEE 2014: CALGARY PRESBYTERIAN CHURCH

The Calgary Presbyterian Church is another church that I have been curious about.  It is situated on Wisconsin Avenue west of Milwaukee's commercial district and just to the east of the north-south freeway.  It has a very tall, very narrow steeple and is colored a  bright red.   It was another of the Doors Open Milwaukee venues for 2014, and I paid it a visit.

Churches that have steeples are generally difficult to capture photographically because the steeple can be so high relative the size of the remainder of the building, and that is especially the case with this church.  So for this visit, at least, I largely ignored the steeple.  Instead, I tried to incorporate other elements, in this case external to the church itself.

In this first shot I featured a street sculpture commemorating, of all things, the soldiers who fought in the Spanish American War of 1898.

Actually, I feel pretty good about the composition of this shot.

Here is a similar shot, this time including a Catholic church down the street.  Incidentally, the church's facade is not made of red bricks.  Instead, they are cream city bricks (light tan) that have been painted red.  Who knew?

The interior of the church was a real surprise.  Stark: No permanent pews and few seats, and very little ornamentation.  In addition, there was an unusual tent-like array of streamers extending from below the ceiling toward the front of the church, as shown in the following shot.

Note also the ornamental rafters, which are original to the 1870 construction.

I thought the best interior features of this church were the "fine-grained" stained glass windows.

Below is a detail shot of the one of the windows.

Here, finally, is another shot of windows that features a couple of visitors in silhouette.

A minor disappointment with this shot is that the figure on the left is lost a bit in the dark space between windows.  Also, I was not square to the window and missed its left edge.  Even so, I liked this shot for its candid feel.

This church has clear Scottish roots and even featured a bagpiper at the front entrance to draw in the visitors.

John