From Gentlemen's Club to Ministry: 425 Union Street's Unlikely Second Act


My Dear Columbia,

It has come to my attention that an address in town is about to undergo a transformation so complete that one is tempted to check the deed for a misprint.

Yes, I refer to 425 Union Street, that modest address which, for more than a decade, has held the town's imagination rather more than it occupied the town's good graces. For years, the building was a gentlemen's club of the sort where the entertainment wore very little. It was, one might say, the only establishment in the borough where the manner of dress (or undress) and the public commentary stood in inverse proportion.

But brace yourselves, dear readers, and perhaps sit down if you are inclined toward fainting: the building has been sold to Align Life Ministries, a faith-based, pro-life nonprofit devoted to pregnancy testing, ultrasounds, parenting classes, and assorted supports for expectant families. The ministry has spent its recent years in cramped quarters at 462 Chestnut Street, and announced that it had simply outgrown the place. The Union Street property is roughly twice the size.

I confess a certain admiration for the symmetry of the thing. A structure once suggestive of the beginning of certain things will now be dedicated to what follows nine months later. If real estate has a sense of humor, it is evidently a dry one.

Columbians have never been known to lack opinions on this particular address. They have merely lacked, until now, an occasion to express them without blushing. However, the good people of Union Street may at last look forward to a neighbor whose hours of operation will mostly coincide with daylight.

Of course, gentle reader, this author is well aware that the arrival of a pregnancy resource center carries its own share of opinions, and that not every heart in the borough will beat in unison over the new tenant's mission. Such is the nature of a town where everyone has known everyone else's business since approximately 1726. But on one point the whole of Columbia may find agreement: the building has finally found an occupant that its neighbors need not explain to visiting relatives.

The former club has closed its doors; the ministry has yet to open its own. In the interval, 425 Union Street sits quietly, perhaps for the first time in living memory, contemplating its second act with all the dignity of a reformed rake at a Sunday service.

In the meantime, this author shall, as ever, be watching.

Yours truly,
Cassandra

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