When Clint Pohl opened the Halo Cafe on the South Side this year in what had been the former Cleaves Temple CME Church, the sanctuary on East Carson Street joined a long list of local houses of worship that had been converted to anything but. Some are offices, schools, artist havens; there's even a hotel and brew pub.

Martha Rial, Post-Gazette Fourth-grader Tiarra Roberts waits for her family to pick her up after school in the board room at Urban League of Pittsburgh Charter School. The school is housed in the former B'nai Israel Synagogue in East Liberty. Behind her is second-grade teacher's aide Christopher Cord. Click photo for larger image.

Such recycling allows buyers to buy large buildings with unique architectural characteristics and sellers to shed costly-to-maintain structures that no longer suit their needs. The deals also benefit city and Allegheny County coffers by putting on local tax rolls previously nontaxable properties.

But it's the spacious interiors and unique elements that attract many tenants. Amy Konop, for example, likes the vaulted ceilings and stained-glass windows that mark the yellow brick edifice where her office, the Emergency Medicine Association of Pittsburgh, is housed -- a converted 19th-century church now known as the 13 Pride Street Professional Building, Uptown.

Finding alternative uses for abandoned or closed churches is nothing new. But locally, the movement began to pick up steam in the mid-1980s, when Ed and Mary Ann Graff bought both the former St. Mary's church and the adjacent Benedictine monastery from the Pennsylvania Department of Transportation for $106,000 in 1984 (PennDOT had acquired the property in 1981 to make room for a planned cloverleaf for I-579).

The Priory -- the common name of the intimate Pressley Street hotel that officially is The Priory - A City Inn was never really a church. The 24-room inn was the monastery that was attached to the church.

Renovations to both -- the priory first, then the sanctuary, which is now a reception hall -- took a total of nine years and more than $2 million.

In Uptown, the 13 Pride Street building, built in 1872 as St. Paul's German Evangelical Lutheran Church, was purchased by two physicians in 1990. Their first tenant was Emergency Medicine, which provides administrative support for emergency room doctors at Mercy Hospital and still occupies the second floor.

	Martha Rial, Post-Gazette A student leaves the Urban League of Pittsburgh Charter School based in the former B'nai Israel synagogue on Negley Avenue in East Liberty. Click photo for larger image.

After one of the partners, Walter Greissinger, died in 1994, the building went into foreclosure and G&A Development bought it from Dollar Bank in 1995. With an adjacent 30-space parking lot, the office building, which rents space for $12 per square foot, is now listed for sale with NAI Pittsburgh Commercial at $899,000.

One of the more unique conversions of a former church occurred in Bloomfield, with the 1996 opening of The Church Brew Works, a combination microbrewery and restaurant on Liberty Avenue. The former St. John the Baptist Roman Catholic Church was closed in 1993 as part of a reorganization of the diocese, and sat idle until February 1996, when Sean Casey bought it for $191,200.

He and fellow Aspinwall entrepreneur Christine Fulton spent the next six months renovating the structure. Pews were cut to smaller lengths, excess wood was used to build the bar, a confessional was dismantled and its bricks used throughout the renovation, another was preserved as storage space. By August 1996, the Church Brew Works was in business, and as it enters its 10th year, it maintains a steady clientele.

In another East End neighborhood, The Urban League of Pittsburgh initially rented the former B'nai Israel synagogue on Negley Avenue in East Liberty in 1998 as a home for its charter school. Three years later, it purchased the domed structure, designed by renowned Pittsburgh architect Henry Hornbostel who had a hand in more than 200 local buildings, including the City County Building, Soldiers & Sailors Memorial Hall, and the Rodef Shalom synagogue in Shadyside.

The B'nai Israel sanctuary, built from 1923 to 1927, seats 1,100 and has a banquet hall attached. But while it has grown to an enrollment of more than 200, the Urban League's charter school, for kindergarten through fifth grade, still uses only a fraction of the space, operating out of an annex that was built in 1950.

"We would love to make use of all the square footage in the building," said Urban League Chief Executive Officer and President Esther Bush. "But we also want to be very respectful of the architecture."

Bush said the group had done "a lot of brainstorming" with the community about how to make greater use of the facility, including a possible expansion of Head Start or early education programs. Many churches have approached the Urban League about using the sanctuary.

But Bush said that the unused parts of building needed further renovations and that until that happens, the charter school's students and faculty have dibs on a "fabulous" building.

Nearby, at Stanton and Negley avenues, the former Union Baptist Church building is home to a wide range of tenants, thanks to an ambitious program created by a pair of former missionaries, Jessica King and Justin Rothshank.

The pair had come to Pittsburgh as volunteers for the Mennonite Urban Corps and felt that the decaying stone structure -- the church closed its doors in 2001 -- had potential for use as a community center.

The two formed the Union Project to cultivate their idea, and bought the building in August 2001 for $125,000. Members of the nonprofit project have since been engaged in renovating it and making space available to the community, sometimes using more creativity than money.

For example, the building's 150 or so stained-glass windows were in need of repair; so instead of simply paying a contractor to restore them, the project put together a class to teach students how to work with stained glass, using the building's windows for their training. Rothshank estimates that the project has saved more than $500,000 restoring about 70 windows.

By Labor Day, Rothshank expects to complete the first phase of renovation, which will make 2,500 square feet available for use by a mixture of artist, community and religious groups that include a painter, a pair of authors and a consulting firm for nonprofits.

And in cyclical fashion, the building -- which originally housed the Second Presbyterian Church -- will now house the Open Door, a new Presbyterian congregation that also will use the sanctuary for Sunday services and will have offices there.