Sacred Spaces, Historic Places: The Construction of Every Place of Worship in Greensboro Tells a Different Story | Local News

The Catholic Church on West Market Street is largely hand-carved, with a pink granite exterior, high ceilings, and period carvings. Above the main entrance sits a statue of the Virgin Mary holding the infant Jesus.

Human skills mirroring those used in other monuments around the world, such as the medieval Notre-Dame de Paris cathedral, designed the church, Briggs said.

“It’s one of the monuments to the success of generations past,” said Briggs. “It should be called a cathedral.”

Another architectural find is the Skenes Chapel building on Martin Luther King Drive. Formerly Asheboro Street Friends Meeting, the congregation moved to Friendly Avenue in the 1950s and is now called First Friends Meeting.

In some ways, the structure reflected the simplicity of Quaker values ​​- enjoying space for the simplicity of space, with clean lines and no stained glass.

The brick church lacked a steeple and a large entrance, but it remains one of the few of its type. This is one of the earliest examples of a Quaker meeting house with columns in the front, a neoclassical style of architecture.

“The Quakers were trying to join mainstream society a bit more than they had in the past, so they went for great architecture,” Briggs explained. “The Quakers, for the first time, were starting to show up a bit – they were incorporating music and hiring pastors. Part of that was like, ‘If we can have our organ, we can have columns.'”