With the opening of The Abbey on Monroe, Phoenix statesman Terry Goddard completes a project 40 years in the making.
By Leah LeMoine | Photography by Jill McNamara
Terry Goddard has always loved old buildings.
“One of my first memories is of San Xavier del Bac,” the former Phoenix mayor and Arizona attorney general says of the 18th-century Catholic mission south of Tucson, his hometown. “My dad [former Arizona governor Sam Goddard Jr.] was the first president of the Tucson Festival Society, and they did the procession down the hill to the church, and that is etched in my memory.”
Another old church has consumed much of his adult life: Phoenix First Baptist Church on Monroe Street and Third Avenue, built between 1928 and 1929. In May, Goddard welcomed Valley movers and shakers to the grand opening of The Abbey on Monroe, an event space that rose from the literal ashes of the historical sanctuary. It was a revival four decades in the making.
“Literally the second week I was mayor, this building… was scheduled to do a total historic restoration,” Goddard says. “I was very excited that this would be the building that would show Phoenix something about its past, and that restoration could be successful, could be important… I think that the prevailing feeling about Phoenix was it didn’t have a real significant past. Well, it does. It has.”
But that January in 1984, a fire erupted that caused thousands of dollars of damage to the Spanish Revival meets Italian Renaissance place of worship, which had gone to seed after its congregation migrated to another location in 1968. “I thought, ‘Well, of course we’re gonna save this building,’” Goddard says. “Because all the walls were standing, even though it was a charred mess. And so, we did some temporary shoring.”
Goddard kept an eye on the Monroe Street property after he left office, and in the early ’90s he helped his nonprofit legal client, Housing Opportunity Center, purchase the church with the help of a $40,000 loan from the National Trust for Historic Preservation – “24 hours before the bulldozers were going to tear the building down.” In 1995, 100 units of affordable housing were completed on part of the property to maintain HOC’s tax-exempt status. But what to do with the church itself?
“We loved the way it looked, frankly, as a ruin,” Goddard says. After an influx of money in the 2010s, his team worked with Tempe architecture firm Jones Studio to embrace what had become of the church, which included a wild tangle of plants in the courtyard. “They saw this garden that was just exploding in the center of a ruined building. And that was their inspiration.”
The “garden in a ruin” is now a venue with two tenants – BTS Event Management and Fresh From the Kitchen catering – specializing in weddings, but open to events of all stripes. At press time, Goddard was in talks with Valley party maestros Walter Productions to partner on events, and with a chef to open a restaurant on the premises. He views the area as “an emerging music district,” with the church’s “excellent acoustics” helping it hold its own with nearby venues The Van Buren, Crescent Ballroom and the Orpheum Theatre.
“There’s a long list of things that we could do,” Goddard says. “The guy who sells wine down the street said he thought they should have a Christmas market here every year. I don’t know, maybe that would work. Somebody else wants to do a Don Quixote festival. I don’t know, but I think that might work. One of my dreams, just knowing the building, was that we could do a Grito de Dolores here on Dieciséis de Septiembre [Mexico’s Independence Day]… I think we have to find the right users and let them do their magic.”
What gave Goddard the patience and tenacity to stick with the project over so many years – years in which he served as attorney general, led a successful fight against dark money in political campaigns, taught at Arizona State University and championed other historical preservation efforts, including his own home and office?
“I’m just stubborn, I guess,” he says. “It’s not a glorious trait, but sometimes it helps.”
