'Instagrammable' and 'the most open concept': Former Long Island churches that are now houses

Church attendance is declining, with just 20% of Americans attending weekly in 2022 versus 32% in 2000, according to Gallup polling. Whatever this might portend in any spiritual sense, it means this in terms of real estate: one-of-a-kind properties for sale when houses of worship get shuttered and go on the market.

"Everybody wants open concept, and a church is the most open concept you could get," said Lorraine Nickla, a Sayville-based Douglas Elliman Real Estate agent who recently sold a church-turned-residence. Additionally, "Everybody likes to be different these days — Instagrammable! A church is a house with a story."

Steve Bodden, president of church-property specialist Ecclesiastical Realty Advisory Services and an elder of the Community Presbyterian Church in Deer Park, believes that with cash-strapped congregations the buildings themselves are less important than a church's mission. Given the costs of upkeep and insurance for aging structures, it often makes sense, he said, "to monetize that real estate to help them in some of their missional goals."

Here are five of the many Long Island houses of worship that could be coming for to carry you home.

Northport

As unassuming as this former Allen AME Church may be, tucked behind a hedge and a white picket fence, it is an important part of Long Island's Black history — enough so that on Aug. 2, 2011, the Town of Huntington declared it a town historic site.

It had been founded around the turn of the last century. "The African American community in Northport wanted a church of their own," said Teresa Reid, director of the Northport Historical Society. "Members of the Methodist Episcopal Mission did fundraising and were able to raise enough money to buy a small piece of land on a wooded slope on the side of Church Street, which then was known as Railroad Street."

Yet after seven years, they still had not collected enough to do more than lay a foundation, Reid said. "And they of course were denied loans. Finally in 1908, William B. Codling, a real estate agent and one of the largest landowners in Northport, loaned them $500 so that they could finally build their church building."

On Nov. 29, 1908, the Allen African Methodist Episcopal Church was dedicated and the cornerstone was laid. (The "Allen" in the name comes from Richard Allen, an 18th century Philadelphia white man who opposed the Methodist Church's racial segregation and in 1879 organized the first AME Church.)

The congregation paid off the loan in 1922, but dwindling membership caused the church to disband in 1965. The building was sold two years later and eventually converted to a residence, according to the Town of Huntington, which said the building then had four successive homeowners. Northport native Terence McNally and his wife, Barbara, became the fifth on Oct. 24, 1994, according to public records, purchasing it for $163,000 from someone who had bought it in 1986.

The McNallys, who refinished and kept the original flooring and wainscoting and installed an antique Spanish door, raised a family there and continue to live in it today. "We love it," Barbara McNally told Newsday in 2019. "It has a happy vibe to it." One former congregant, she said, told her "he couldn't imagine it as a house. I told him I couldn't imagine it as a church."

Greenport

"The foundation for a German Lutheran Church has been laid in Greenport," read the two-sentence squib in the South Side Signal newspaper of Dec. 13, 1879. "The church is to be pushed to a speedy completion." And it was, being dedicated as St. Peter's German Lutheran Church on Aug. 15, 1880.

It served its congregation nearly 80 years until June 1958, when St. Peter's purchased a site elsewhere and subsequently sold this building. Today, the one-story Gothic Revival church with a three-story central tower on a quaint corner lot on Fifth Avenue is a two-bedroom, one-bath abode available as a summer rental. In the winter, it's a stop on the Stirling Historical Society of Greenport's Victorian Holiday House Tour.

Kathleen Lofrese, 63, of Southold, and her three children bought the building in March 2024 for $565,000, according to public records.

"It was for sale for a very long time and nobody wanted to buy it except mostly people that wanted to tear it down," explained the former Breezy Point building inspector, a do-it-yourselfer who for decades has renovated and flipped houses. "So we bought it so that it could stay the way it is. It's a little time capsule," she said. "It had a lot of its original elements that we tried to restore and keep in the church."

Perhaps foremost among those, she said, are "the 12 magnificent stained glass windows. They were made in Germany and shipped over by boat and then brought out by the railroad to the church." The vestry had been made into a kitchen, but Lofrese wanted to provide a small office space. "That meant I had to move the kitchen, so I made the altar [area] the kitchen." Lofrese with her husband, Ronald, also redid the wood floors, among many other improvements.

But she worries about the building's longtime viability. "The insurance is well over $10,000 a year for this [former] church because of its age" and other factors. "There's a lot to consider."

Brookhaven

Still called Chapel House — its on-the-nose name for what it used to be — the two-bedroom, two-bath, 1,953-square-foot home on a 0.4-acre lot sits on, appropriately, Chapel Avenue. Built in 1829, according to most accounts, it was founded by Congregationalists, part of a movement within Protestantism.

Initially a simple rectangular building containing a pulpit, the chapel was called a "lecture room" on an 1873 map. Sometime between 1885 and 1900, it was acquired by Presbyterians, who enlarged it and added a steeple. Serving as the parish house of the South Haven Presbyterian Church, it held Sunday-school classes and benefit bazaars. In mid-1946, Mr. and Mrs. George P. Morse opened an antique store there, with one room housing Harold M. Ballard's clock and watch repair shop.

It became residential "I would say in the 1950s," estimated retired corporate executive Paula Ludlow, now of Moriches, who with her then-husband bought the building in December 1979. As she recalls, it initially had been purchased by one Frank Creighton, who put in a kitchen and a new wall with a fireplace.

"I remember when we were looking at it, we were just a couple, we lived in Manhattan, looking for a weekend house," Ludlow said. "The main room, which we used as a living room, has beams across it, and we put a chandelier in. One of the original pews is in the house, and each owner passes it on to the next."

The Ludlows "extended the kitchen by about 12, 15 feet," adding two Bosch dishwashers, a six-burner gas stovetop and a Subzero refrigerator. They also "built a dining room and a sitting room, and made the guest room into a suite with an en suite bathroom," Ludlow said. Additionally, "The chapel has a cedar shake roof that we replaced at least two or three times, and the new owners," who bought it from the since-divorced Ludlow in November 2024 for $990,000, public records show, "just replaced it [again]."

Mount Sinai

This one-time Methodist Church may be Long Island's oldest former house of worship to be in continual use as a residence, with the building going up in 1846 and first being sold as a house on July 29, 1905.

And this three-story Dutch Colonial Revival, or Gambrel Colonial, remains the original structure, said historian Edna Davis Giffen, a former board-member of the Miller Place-Mount Sinai Historical Society. "It used to be closer to the road," she noted, "but one of the people who bought it back in the 1980s or 1990s picked it up and moved it back to where it is today, because it was maybe 3 feet from" Shore Road.

That first buyer in 1905 was William R.P. Van Pelt, who planned to make it into a summer cottage. He eventually sold it to Henry Kassinger, of New York City and Mount Sinai, who according to a 1928 obituary "owned the old church on the Lower road and remodelled it into the house that is now known as the Roeth [C]ottage."

The Roeth sisters had bought it from Henry's daughter, Lizzie Kassinger, in 1913. They then sold it to a Roeth family member, Emma R. Miller, in July 1934, Giffen said. It continued to go through other hands until interior designer Barbara Daddino bought it in 2004.

Explaining to Newsday in 2019 that, "I never wanted to live in an ordinary house," Daddino made improvements but retained the original doors, windows and moldings. "Because it was a church, it's not a warren of rooms," she added in a separate 2019 interview. As well, "It has a plenum airspace" — a compartment that facilitates the flow of air — "so when I added air conditioning and overhead lighting, I didn't have to destroy anything."

Daddino sold it to Susan M. and Wimmer Cusmano in September 2019 for $575,000, according to public records.

Cutchogue

Shrinking membership at the Methodist churches in Cutchogue, Greenport, Orient and Southold in the mid-2010s forced a merger of congregations to form the North Fork United Methodist Church. All four former churches were sold. The Orient property remains in a development stage. Southold's became space for the nonprofit Center for Advocacy Support and Transformation (CAST).

Two became private residences. The 5,590-square-foot former church on Main Street in Greenport sold for $990,000 in November 2020, public records show. In 2023, owner Joseph Sbarra applied to Greenport's Historic Preservation Commission to do roof work and to paint.

And in 2019 the Cutchogue church became a private residence, now occupied. Rebuilt in 1928 after a lightning strike on July 7, 1927, burned the 1850s original to the ground, the 7,000-square-foot property had been listed for $849,000.

"The owner put a tremendous amount of money into it," said Pastor Tom MacLeod, 72, a former contractor who oversaw the sales of the properties. "He is an art collector and he wanted as much space as possible to exhibit his art." Noting that the owner "is very private," the pastor said the property now is "surrounded by a lot of hedges and trees to give him as much privacy as he wants and desires."