Lakewood United Methodist Church stands out from the stucco shopping mall next to it. Its roof zigzags and its windowpanes angle into one another.
It was built in 1962, at the peak of Florida's population explosion. According to the city of St. Petersburg, between 1950 and 1970, the town’s population more than doubled. The new insecticide DDT thinned off mosquitoes. The new highway system made it easier for flocks of tourists to visit. The catchword was progress, and the "new and improved" Florida attracted millions to its specially dredged beaches. “The idea of a second chance — there was kind of an innocence that’s hard to imagine now,” says Gary Mormino, a professor at the Florida Studies Center of the University of South Florida St. Petersburg. The people who relocated to Florida took root and created communities from scratch. South St. Petersburg, where Lakewood United Methodist Church now stands, was a collage of horse farms and forests. Several churches in the area were built within the span of a decade, including Lakewood United Methodist and Lakewood United Church of Christ. They became new spaces to carry on old traditions.
The world of architecture tried to keep up with the relentless optimism of the time. "Architects had a lot more freedom in the '50s and the '60s," says Dan Dawson, a St. Petersburg architect who's familiar with the style known as mid-century modernism. He says that with churches, architects finally began to use the elements pioneered by Frank Lloyd Wright and others. Churches no longer had to conform to “the traditional rules from hundreds of years prior to that,” Dawson says. “Now people decided they could mess with those rules.”
Lakewood United Methodist Church was built in 1962, although it was founded seven years earlier. The architect, Don Williams, designed it to resemble a fish from above. The ceiling has a shape like an ark, and fish are carved into the arm rests at the end of each pew.
Lakewood United Church of Christ was built in 1965. First it was a Lutheran church, but internal debates made the members leave the denomination. In the sanctuary, one wall is nothing but sliding glass doors. When most of Florida wasn't air-conditioned, they would have made for good air flow, and Dawson says they were a trendy architectural detail in the 1960s. Now, “People like the openness,” says Reverend Kim P. Wells, the pastor. A few months ago, there was a proposal to cover the view partially to make the church more energy efficient, but the congregation decided the wall of doors was too important to lose. “The functionality fits us; the flexibility fits us,” Wells says. For some services, they rearrange the chairs to face outward, to contemplate the outdoors.
One recent afternoon, Dawson gave a tour of Lakewood United Methodist Church. He pointed out the features of the church that link it to the past. Every angle, every door and every window tells him something. In this video, he shares it with us.