St. Paul’s Chapel was built in 1764 and designed by Thomas McBean. It is the oldest standing church building in Manhattan and it is said that George Washington worshipped there on the day of his Inauguration. It has a Georgian architecture style and is absolutely stunning. I was lucky to have gotten to visit the chapel while on a trip to New York City during Spring Break of my senior year in high school. We went to many places on this trip but I can still vividly remember the chapel.

             I took all of the indoor pictures and the picture of the outside facing the World Trade Center. I remember being surprised by how homey it felt inside and by the welcoming colors of pastel pink and blue. This chapel is right by where the Twin Towers stood and was a refuge for volunteers after 9/11. I remember the man giving us a tour telling us that though every building surrounding them had major damage, but the chapel escaped with not even a broken window. There is a small cemetery in the back of the chapel, facing the World Trade Center, and you could still see pieces of glass on the ground out there from when the Twin Towers collapsed. This was a very emotional place for me because of its correlation with the 9/11 attack, but a memorable one for sure.

Crossway First Baptist Church is located in Sulphur, Oklahoma and is where my family has gone to church for the past 8 years. What fascinates me the most about the structure and architecture of the building is that it actually used to be a Wal-Mart. As the picture shows, it was not a fancy Wal-Mart and wasn’t a Supercenter Wal-Mart which sells groceries. Sulphur is a really small town in southern Oklahoma with a population of about 5,000, so growing up Wal-Mart was the place where we would go to hang out. First Baptist Church was originally in a different building but was bought by the Chickasaw Nation, and relocated to the old Wal-Mart in 2010. My best friend and I were actually baptized in cattle troughs in the empty Wal-Mart building while construction was still underway. If you were to walk into the building today, you wouldn’t even know it used to be a Wal-Mart. The architects did a great job and it is hard for even me to believe that I used to go there to shop instead of worship. They increased the height of the ceiling and it truly made all the difference in making it stand out from the old building structure. It is also an interesting and special building to the community because volunteers from the community worked hard helping with demolition and construction. It is a special building to me because I have personally witnessed its transition and can say that I was the first person baptized there.