Karpeles Manuscript Library

A monumental former Christian Science church of red brick and pale stone, fronted by a temple portico of six giant Corinthian columns carrying a full entablature and a pedimented gable with a carved roundel in its tympanum; the frieze is lettered KARPELES MANUSCRIPT LIBRARY MUSEUM. Tall round-arched windows lit the auditorium behind, and a raised basement lifts the entrance above a broad flight of steps. Fire has since gutted the building: the roof is gone, the interior stripped to scorched brick walls, exposed steel beams, and heaped debris, the tall arched windows now framing open sky. The portico and outer masonry walls still stand.

The building was completed in 1911 as the Third Church of Christ, Scientist, one of several Christian Science congregations that raised classical temple-form churches across St. Louis in the early twentieth century. It later served the New Paradise Missionary Baptist Church. In 2015 the property was acquired by the family behind the Karpeles Manuscript Library Museums, a chain of free museums founded by California collector David Karpeles to display original historical manuscripts. The St. Louis branch — the thirteenth in the chain — opened in August 2015, sharing the building with the St. Louis Media History Foundation and showing rotating documents alongside regional collections. On the night of March 26, 2019, a major fire tore through the building. The roof caved in and the rear and upper floor were heavily damaged, though the front portico survived and museum staff and firefighters carried the manuscripts out before flames or water reached them; the collections were moved to private safekeeping. The building has stood open to the weather ever since. Renovation plans and a prospective sale both fell through, and it remains a vacant, roofless shell, offered for sale.