Belt Publishing's forthcoming title, Midwest Architecture Journeys, features contributions from over twenty architects, critics, and journalists, taking the reader on a tour of some of the regions most inventive structures. The collection of writings feature works by Eliel Saarinen, Frank Lloyd Wright, Bruce Goff, and Bertrand Goldberg, among many others, while also giving equal attention to unique sites along the way, such as indigenous mounds, grain silos, parking lots, flea markets, and abandoned warehouses. 

Midwest Architecture Journeys is edited by Zach Mortice, a design journalist based in Chicago. The book will be released on October 15th and may be purchased directly from Belt Publishing. 

For this installment of Screen/Print we are featuring a piece by Mark Clemens, entitled "Beneath the Cross in Bronzeville", looking at Chicago's First Church of Deliverance. The designer of the distinctive church was Walter T. Bailey, the first African-American architect registered in Illinois. The building is representative of the Streamline Moderne style, a style not often associated with religious structures. Equally unique as the style of the architecture was the personality of church's original preacher, the Reverend Clarence H. Cobbs.

Beneath the Cross in Bronzeville

by Mark Clemens

Any discussion of the preacher or his church mentions the preamble to his weekly radio service, so one may as well start there:

You in the taverns tonight; you on the dance floor; you in the poolrooms and policy stations; you on your bed of affliction—Jesus loves you all, and Reverend Cobbs is thinking about you, and loves every one of you. It doesn’t matter what you think about me, but it matters a lot what I think about you.

The preacher is the Reverend Clarence H. Cobbs and his church is Chicago’s First Church of Deliverance. The service was broadcast, as it continues to be, every Sunday night from 1934 on. “You” was anyone with reason to stay home from church: racketeers and petty criminals, gamblers, drag queens, those who found the church’s demands tiresome, those who preferred enjoying their money to giving it away; in short, those who found no relief or even interest in the promise of heaven but were very concerned with their needs and desires in this world. Cobbs announced, in other words, that he wanted a flock full of black sheep.

Fittingly, his church doesn’t really look like a church... What it does look like is the kind of old movie theater that is the pride of small towns across the Midwest

Fittingly, his church doesn’t really look like a church. It’s long and squat, with a facade of terracotta tiles, mostly cream-colored with five pistachio stripes running horizontally the length of the building. A sixth, in red, marks the top of the building. No Bible stories in stained glass, but big glass brick windows. There is no steeple; instead, twin squarish towers flank the entrance a limousine-length apart. What it does look like is the kind of old movie theater that is the pride of small towns across the Midwest. It’s easy to picture a marquee unfurled between the towers, the roof below studded with high-wattage bulbs.

Cobbs came from Memphis during World War I, one of tens of thousands of southern blacks who moved to Chicago in those years—the city’s black population more than quadrupled between 1910 and 1930. Almost all the migrants landed in the neighborhood that called itself Bronzeville, more or less Chicago’s

Harlem: a “city within a city,” a long, narrow strip on the South Side. In 1928, Cobbs was riding a bus when he heard the voice of God, bidding him to start a church. The First Church of Deliverance (God revealed the name to him, he said) began the next year, with the reverend preaching from an ironing board in the living room of his mother’s home. He was twenty-five years old. Soon he was operating out of a storefront—common practice for the poorer churches in town.

The church belonged to the Spiritualist tradition, a syncretic strain of Pentecostalism brought to Chicago by southern migrants. Seances and other psychic effusions were common practices. Like other Spiritualist preachers, Cobbs blessed and sold flowers, medals, and candles, promising they would bring luck and healing. Unlike other storefront Spiritualists, he drew crowds, enough that in 1933 he moved the congregation into a vacant hat factory at Forty-third and Wabash. This at the outset of the Depression, which was especially grim in Bronzeville, where every other family was on relief. Every black-owned bank in the city had closed. Consider what sort of person could raise $25,000 from the poorest people in the city during this time, and then consider the ambition needed to do it in four years.

Cobbs’s aspirations did not end there. He needed a church that proclaimed itself unlike other churches, that his project was something new. The most venerable black churches in the city were beautiful, but they were not built for their current parishioners— most were churches or synagogues purchased from white congregations who left the neighborhood as Bronzeville expanded. Cobbs would instead transfigure the old factory into something tailored to his message, something never seen before.

Work began in 1939, doubling the width of the building and adding a second story for the all-important recording booth. The expanded sanctuary held over a thousand people. To house all this, Cobbs commissioned Walter Bailey to remodel the exterior. Bailey was one of the city’s most prestigious black architects—the first one licensed in Illinois—and had headed the architecture department at Tuskegee University, working under Booker T. Washington. First Deliverance would be the last project he completed—he died two years later.

Cobbs commissioned Walter Bailey to remodel the exterior. Bailey was one of the city’s most prestigious black architects—the first one licensed in Illinois—and had headed the architecture department at Tuskegee University, working under Booker T. Washington

The church’s style is technically called Streamline Moderne, sort of the populist cousin to Art Deco. Think of tiled subway stations, bus depots, railcar diners, and WPA-built post offices. The illusion of high velocity is common: corners rounded in big curves as if blurred, horizontal stripes known as speed lines. Glass bricks and chrome. Clean, with little ornament. The design was almost unprecedented in Bronzeville and church architecture in general, and was an odd late-career choice for Bailey, who worked mostly in the filigreed style popular at the turn of the century. One suspects Cobbs had more than a hand in it.

It wouldn’t be surprising. Cobbs grasped the tenor of modernity and how to play to it. He understood the new media, not shouting over the airwaves like a tent revivalist, but speaking softly and directly, as FDR did in his fireside chats—“he comes on in a quiet manner as the counselor,” says the historian Joseph Washington. For music minister, Cobbs tapped the gospel composer Kenneth Morris, who paired a Hammond organ with his choir to create the sound of gospel music for the next forty years. Cobbs liked modern art, and would drop in on the bohemians at the South Side Community Arts Center (a coterie that included poet Gwendolyn Brooks and photographer and future Shaft director Gordon Parks), bringing them pop and sandwiches. There he met the artist Frederick Jones, who painted two murals inside the church and carved six massive oak doors for the entrance of First Deliverance (made, it was claimed, from a hundred-year-old tree on Cobbs’s summer property). The doors were declared a fire hazard in 2010 and were replaced by ordinary glass ones, though the originals now stand in the church’s foyer.

The church actually did have a fire, in 1945. As part of the rebuilding effort, Cobbs took the opportunity to add to the building, commissioning Jones to do the doors and murals, and adding the two towers out front. They have large glass brick windows, which catch the sun in the evening and become two sheets of reflected light. A broad, flat roof aprons both towers halfway up the building, and the resulting H creates a deep cloister. Through the doors, the sanctuary preserves some of the movie theater look of the exterior—its 1,100 chairs are cinema-style, with spring-loaded seats. The walls are intensely bright green, almost chartreuse. Windows of opaque glass line the sides, each with a neat gold cross in the middle.

Typical for Spiritualist churches, there are lots of touches lifted from Catholicism

Typical for Spiritualist churches, there are lots of touches lifted from Catholicism. A traditional high altar, complete with tabernacle, sits on a dais at the front of the room. Along the wall is a devotional niche with stadium-seated red-shaded candles. The dais is a good four feet above the congregation, with white leather furniture where the speakers sit during services. Two marble lecterns stand on opposite sides, repeating the proportions of the towers indoors. Behind the altar, surrounding it on three sides, is the choir loft, its walls trimmed in chrome. All this is taken in only after staring at the ceiling, for suspended lengthwise over the congregation is an enormous cross, made of frosted glass and lit from within by dozens of red and green lights.

The whole church is organized along the horizontal. The sanctuary is a shallow U, bringing every seat as close to the altar as possible. Fred Jones’s murals—the only figurative art in the building—are both long and narrow bands of color. The exterior is dominated by the speed lines that streak across the building and the low roof over the entrance. It looks like the church is trying to stretch north and south to take up more of Wabash Avenue. And in fact, it has: the buildings on either side are owned by the church, one a center for children’s worship, the other a daycare and community center. Across the street is a nursing home, another Cobbs venture.

Cobbs does not fit neatly into the stock clergy types. In Black Metropolis, their exhaustive cross section of Bronzeville in the Depression, St. Clair Drake and Horace Cayton say that Cobbs “wears clothes of the latest cut, drives a flashy car, uses slang, and is considered a good sport.” There’s a photo of him at home in 1941, taken by Russell Lee: he’s smoking from a long cigarette holder, seated in an easy chair, his feet up. He wears an ascot and robe, and has the pencil mustache and magnificent bastard smile of Clark Gable. Once he made the gossip column in Jet for purchasing a twenty-dollar necktie with a $1,000 bill, and during services wore vestments rumored to cost as much as the pope’s.

This extravagance was used to the church’s advantage. Showing off his lifestyle and befriending gangsters (often holding their funerals) told potential members that getting religion Cobbs’s way did not mean forsaking the world, the flesh, and the devil. Washington calls Cobbs “a man of the street, of the people ... a man of the cloth who did not fight sin, but joined it, accepted it, cherished it.” Drake and Clayton are typically blunt and class-conscious in their assessment. “It is probable,” they speculate, “that in a few years even upper-middle-class people will not lose status by becoming members.” This proved an understatement. In the 1950s and ’60s the church was a place to be seen: black celebrities from Duke Ellington to Redd Foxx attended services when they passed through town.

As much as he relished the wealth and status that came with his position, Cobbs was no Jim Bakker-esque hypocrite. Instead he seems to have tried to prove the gospels wrong, serving God and mammon with equal fervor. He was devoted to his community and held his money in an open hand. With First Deliverance he started a blood bank, a visiting nurses service, and a home for convalescents. If congregants couldn’t pay their bills, the church covered them. In the late 1960s, Cobbs discovered the R&B pioneer Billy Williams living destitute in a flophouse, and took him into his home. When Williams died and no relatives could be found to claim the body, Cobbs went down to the coroner’s office and demanded it be released to his care, then performed the funeral himself and paid for the burial.

During the mid-twentieth century, First Deliverance was part of the gay nightlife circuit in Bronzeville, with some members going directly from the 11:00 p.m. service to the local clubs

While attracting the rich and aiding the poor, Cobbs was also sensitive to those on the social margins. During the mid-twentieth century, First Deliverance was part of the gay nightlife circuit in Bronzeville, with some members going directly from the 11:00 p.m. service to the local clubs. The church was known as a safe place for the gay community, where no questions were asked and no judgment preached. Questions circulated about Cobbs’s own sexuality for years—he often took his male secretary on his lavish vacations, paid for by the church—though he never admitted anything in public, and in 1940 sued a newspaper who reported he was the subject of a police investigation over “rumors of a scandalous nature.”

The architecture of First Deliverance, then, is a sort of portrait of its flashy, modern founder. The distinctly non-ecclesial facade blurs sacred and profane, a gradient rather than the sharp transition of most churches. The church is accessible, undemanding. Black Metropolis describes First Deliverance as catering to “the urban sophisticate who does not wish to make the break with religion, but desires a streamlined church which allows him to take his pleasures undisturbed.” It is no coincidence that streamlined perfectly describes the church’s architecture as well as its theology.

It is no coincidence that streamlined perfectly describes the church’s architecture as well as its theology

Perhaps this is the point of all First Deliverance’s horizontals: the building reaches into its neighborhood, seeking to draw in people and, like a conduit, redirect their lives (if only subtly) and send them back out to the world. Inside the church, there is little need to look up, no cathedral vault or saints in stained glass. The sanctuary has a low ceiling for a church—heaven is very close here. It seems important that there is no large cross mounted upright, not on the altar or anywhere else. Rather, the giant, lit cross hangs over the heads of the people. God is not something to be approached after performing the appropriate rites; God is already with you, just above you, raining down light.

Cobbs has been dead for almost forty years, and his church has slowly waned in size and prominence. The current pastor, James Bryson, is taking a run at restoring its old stature, using a magnetic personality, social media savvy, and a strong dose of health-and-wealth theology. At a service in 2018 dedicated to remembering Cobbs’s life and work, Bryson took stock of the state of the building. “It’s been neglected for a while,” he said, “we just have so much work to do—the towers are wrapped in wire because they’re about to fall off.” The terracotta work is chipping and cracking, sheets of galvanized metal hold some key places together. Time has been unkind to Bronzeville since the days of Reverend Cobbs, though no more so than the city government has been. Yet First Deliverance has recently received a grant for restoration work, and at the same service Bryson revealed that a downtown bank is lining up a large donation. “We’re still here,” he grinned. “Turn to your neighbor and say, ‘I’m still here.’” The church burbled with hundreds of people affirming their endurance.

Cobbs is still there, too. On the sanctuary wall behind the choir is a mural painted by Jones. On the left side Cobbs is depicted blessing a mother and child kneeling before him. Shafts of light pour onto the scene. On the right is Christ himself, painted with the stylized bulging forehead of Eastern Orthodox icons. With his still-bleeding hands, he embraces a family and ushers them towards Cobbs. If you would find me, he says, here’s the man to see. It is an outrageous self-anointing, though not out of character for Cobbs. In their white robes the two figures are mirror images, and suggest the towers standing outside the church, the pillars it rests on. Cobbs liked to refer to the towers as the Old and the New Testament, but it may be that what they really represented, to the man himself as well as the institution he built, was the preacher and his Lord.

Screen/Print is an experiment in translation across media, featuring a close-up digital look at printed architectural writing. Divorcing content from the physical page, the series lends a new perspective to nuanced architectural thought.

For this issue, we featured a selection from Midwest Architecture Journeys. Find out more about the publication here.

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