Talk:Old South Church

Untitled
Interior photography would be nice, the present interior image doesn't show much.CApitol3 18:17, 1 October 2006 (UTC)

Restoration c.1890?
In this book. I see reference to a preservation of the Old South Church. No date specified, but presumably some time before 1898.

However, I don’t see any mention of this in the article. I may use this fact in another article, and planned to link to this article, but want to make sure I have the right article. Does anyone know more about a preservation effort in this time period?-- SPhilbrick (Talk)  19:04, 13 March 2013 (UTC)


 * The church building was begun in the 1870s. Its interior was redecorated by Tiffany thirty years later.
 * I cannot imagine that in the twenty years between the 1870s and 1890s that it required "preservation".
 * "Preservation" is not the term that is usually used for buildings. It is used for things like documents, natural specimens etc.
 * The words used for buildings are Conservation, Restoration and Renovation which have different meanings.


 * Conservation- is similar to "preservation" in that it attempts to maintain what is actually present, adding only material that is normally replacable, or that can be reversed.
 * e.g. filling gaps in the stonework with soft mortar to stop water ingress, re-grouting the window glass, replacing sashcords, renewing the thatched roof on a medieval building (which would be done every 30-50 years in the life of the building)


 * Restoration- putting things back the way they were, building up walls that have fallen down, adding a roof where it is missing,  removing parts of the building that are of a later date.
 * Renovation- substantial changes to make the building different in some way e.g inserting a wall, adding a bathroom.

Because the word "renovation" is used by home-owners, it is often mis-applied to the conservation or restoration of historic properties.

Amandajm (talk) 00:18, 14 March 2013 (UTC)
 * I think I figured it out, mostly. per this document, " When the Old South Meeting-house was threatened with destruction, she contributed $100,000 towards its preservation". There is a relationship between the Old South Church and the Old South Meeting House, as the meeting house was originally a church, and after the fire of 1872, the congregation built a new church, the Old South Church. I'm still not following why the meeting house was called a meeting house rather than a church, I do understand that many early churches were also used as meeting houses, and my guess is that when they built a new church, the old location came to be called a meeting house, but I wish the article were clearer on that point, because it is a guess.


 * In any event, my goal was to make sure if I used a wikilink, I linked to the right article, and I now see I want to link to Old South Meeting House, where the term "preservation" makes more sense, even though, as you note, the better term might be restoration.-- SPhilbrick (Talk)  13:49, 14 March 2013 (UTC)

Moorish Arches?
What's Moorish about the arches in the campanile? Ordinarily I'd think of "Moorish arch" as a synonym for "horseshoe arch," but perhaps it means something different here? The arches on the campanile look like regular Gothic arches to me. I suppose one might say the alternating colors of the voussoirs give an effect reminiscent of the interior of the mosque at Cordoba, though that patterning is equally to be found in the Palatine Chapel at Aachen, for instance. 206.208.105.129 (talk) 15:53, 10 June 2014 (UTC)

External links modified
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