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The Rev. James Arthur Jones dodged the shower of stone being chipped off his Harlem church front and said defiantly, "It's going to be beautiful.
"This is a house of worship," he added, as more terra-cotta rained down.
"And it's going to look like a church, not a theater," he said, as one last giant stone head fell to the sidewalk. One Sunday soon, the 500 parishioners of the Williams Institutional C.M.E. Church on Adam Clayton Powell Boulevard at 132nd Street will pass under neatly trimmed crosses and pointed arches, where stone ornaments stood.
But the facelift destroyed the facade that marked the building's original identity as the Lafayette Theatre, circa 1912, and Jones - while sidestepping the cascading rubble - has caught full-force the wrath of preservationists.
"Banal," is how his most vocal critic, Michael Adams, described the facade work. "It's a wicked, wicked act." Awakened to what they call the Carnegie Halls of Harlem, Adams and other preservationists are moving to save a smattering of historic monuments and entire blocks throughout Harlem.
Many are in decay, boarded up or converted to other uses. Most are under assault by sundry development pressures. And there's an air of desperation among preservationists, who are not pulling punches.
When director Spike Lee recently filmed a crack scene for his latest movie, "Jungle Fever," in the Renaissance theater just up 7th Avenue from Lafayette, an indignant Steven Abels rushed to the scene. "The nerve of Spike Lee,"...