Old West Church has been recommended to receive a $50,000 Community Preservation Act grant from the city to continue exterior restoration work on the envelope of its building at 131 Cambridge St.
Rev. Dr. Sara Garrard, the church’s pastor, said the cost of the entire project is about $700,000, and that restoration on the tower, as well as the first-floor windows, had already been completed for around $400,000. (The city awarded $4000,000 in CPA funds to the church in 2019, which paid for this work.)
The latest CPA funds, she said, will be used to complete restoration on the church’s east-west facing windows.
The church had requested $100,000 from the city to cover this entire phase of the project, said Rev. Garrard, but it was ultimately only recommended to receive half that sum.
“We’ve done about one-third of the windows,” she added. “We have a lot of windows.”
The Old West Church is home to a United Methodist congregation comprising a diverse cross-section of people from Greater Boston neighborhoods and serves as an urban training parish for students from BU School of Theology. Its congregation also partners with the Boston Food Forest Coalition to offer a food forest on the church grounds.
Visit www.oldwestchurch.org for more information on Old West Church.