Family turned a former Freemason temple in Indiana into a home

That's pretty cool! Do you have a link to any sort of pictures, etc?

Wow that takes me back. In Southwestern Ontario the Odd Fellows and Freemason halls were often rented out by us as teenagers and young adults for shows.

That said, we were also often kicked out of them (bunch of dumb, loud kids were we) and did something of a circle between the Masons, Odd Fellows, Shriners, Kinsmen's, and other community halls and then back again over the years.

A few guys from Brantford (ON) eventually got sick of getting kicked out and set up a non-profit that was a little more raw and ragged than your friends' efforts, but it was surely equal of passion! [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ford_Plant]

It was a great time...

Buying one of those halls was a totally prescient move!

There's a major venue downtown Toronto that was once a YMCA, aptly named The Great Hall that sounds similar in operation (though I believe it's for-profit?) [https://www.thegreathall.ca/history/]

Thanks for sharing! I love these kinds of stories

It's great to hear that Cumberland is working as a venue! I would expect a venue in Cumberland to have trouble competing with those in Fall River (MA), Worcester (MA), and Providence (RI). My impression of Cumberland has always been that it's in the middle of nowhere, despite maps clearly showing that it's not.

EDIT: I'm really glad you mentioned that place. I just looked at their current lineup [0], and I'm actually thinking about catching some of the performances. Thanks!

[0] http://www.riverfolk.org/events-tickets/

You are noticing the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect.

Sign outside the building says "Masonic temple". Not sure if it is original. I'd assume that the lodge is organizational unit, while temple is a building. Wiki seems to agree.

"A Masonic Temple or Masonic Hall is, within Freemasonry, the room or edifice where a Masonic Lodge meets"

Lodge and Temple in informal usage are interchangeable, but formally the Lodge is the organizational subunit and the Temple is the Lodge's meeting space.

https://pasadenamasonic.org/ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Masonic_Temple

There are a couple of interesting looking Freemason facilities in the Washington, DC, area. I keep meaning to take the tours. My great-grandfather was a 33rd degree Mason. He was the whole classic stereotype: a civil engineer of Scottish descent!

What does the difference between "secret organization" vs "organization of secrets" mean?

The article also casually mentions the building being haunted, so I'm not sure if expecting superb journalism here is reasonable.

What kind of secrets?

At work I've referred to e.g. Hashicorp Vault as "secrets management" rather than "secret management" to avoid this sort of ambiguity and misreading.

Consider the references to ghosts later in the article, you shouldn't be surprised that they play up the "spooky" aspect. No one benefits from telling the simple truth that it's just a fairly large community center.

I'm not going to lie, the very first thing i thought about was the rates they'd be paying. And the utilities any problem they have is at a commercial scale. I'd be interesting to see what their insurance looks like too.

Either way. Good for them.

"It’s not bad at all!! We have 6 separate central a/c units and 8 separate central heating units. We can pick & choose what parts of the building to heat/cool and to varying temperatures. Our highest gas bill this past winter was $330 and that included almost an entire month of subzero temperatures. The building is incredibly well insulated."

https://www.reddit.com/r/mildlyinteresting/comments/e4r2ap/m...

A lot of conversions wind up with heating problems. Especially converted warehouses or industrial garages. One solution are to create cubby like warm rooms, or go Asian and use kotatsus, which is how I handled it in southern China (not a conversion, but no indoor heat meant the same thing). Still sucks. These things work better in milder climates like the LA or the Bay Area.

Strangely no one has brought up cleaning, that place must accumulate a lot of dust. I would assume they hire cleaners but I have no idea what that would cost.

This is what I was thinking about. When I was looking around for my first home, I definitely fantasized about buying some big, old building that was cheap/in need of work but still livable (for some definitions of livable...basically I don't mind if it's grungy for a couple of years while I work on it).

Unfortunately, even in my city (which is not in good financial shape) there weren't too many of these legally zoned for residence. Sure there are the old warehouses and de facto "lofts" where artists and crust punks live off the radar or with a wink and a grin (suuuuure, you're just working there and not living there...) but most of the big places were either in such poor shape I couldn't really consider living there or not legal to use as a residence.

On top of that, even the ones in really bad shape were selling for $200k or more. For someone with a $400k budget and somewhere else to live for a year that's fine because you can get the whole thing gutted and renovated. For someone like me with a $200-250k budget it was a no-go. Any cool "fixer uppers" I found in the $100-150k range were bought for cash within a few days of listing--prime targets for cash-rich developers who can clean them up and flip for profit.

In the end I compromised and found a place for $170k that had not been maintained, still needs loads of work, but was livable once I got all of the trash and cat stank out of the place. It's a reasonably large (though nothing like the Mason Lodge) 100-ish year old townhouse and I've been slowly renovating and repairing over the past couple of years.

Even then, it was difficult to get homeowner's insurance. My initial provider dropped me as soon as they found out I was working on it while living in it. Unless I could show them a timeline and refer them to a general contractor (who wasn't me learning as I went along) they didn't want the risk. Ended up getting some community insurance that wasn't nearly as expensive as whatever my lender would've forced on me but also wasn't too much worse than a "traditional" provider.

Still loads of frustration, it will take forever at the rate I'm going just getting in a day or two per week of real work. But I must be a glutton for punishment because I still think it's cooler than just taking out a bigger loan for something that was already renovated by someone else. At the very least, I can pay for supplies and hire contractors when I have the funds, but I'm not on the hook for a higher mortgage payment every month if some unforeseen circumstance leaves money temporarily tight.

And it's pretty cool learning by faking it until I make it. I'm still no craftsman but I'm a lot better at some of this stuff than I was a few years ago. Maybe in another few years I'll be vaguely competent!

In the 90s, a large percentage of LSD manufacture in the US took place in an old nuclear missile silo in Kansas.

I discovered them a couple of years ago when I went to see a movie (The Greatest Showman) at McMenamins in Centralia, WA. Wow. I twas like going back in time. Oddly, one of my favorite things was the bathroom. Original porcelain from the 1920's or so, and the urinals didn't flush. Instead, wastewater from the sink drained into the urinals and flushed them. Very efficient!

I guess you should have ponied up the $89k and fixed it up how you seen fit.

You're right...that's an actually bucket they're using for the sink. It's a little embarrassing to look at.

The bathroom is pretty bad, but the other renovated rooms are decent. The kitchen looks great, the kids room is acceptable, and the library is very classy, although I think the desk may be facing the wrong way...

The whole thing sold for the price of tiny ranch house in a bad neighborhood, the fact that anyone is putting effort into it is positive.

That’s actually a really hip design trend. I have seen this at places in the Bay Area. It looks very “authentic”

> I suspect the local historical preservation society has limits on the exterior of old buildings but can't do anything about the interior work.

As they should. This building is better off renovated to the owners' tastes than rotting, which is what would surely happen if a preservation society tried to dictate interior changes.

Friend had a modern 20,000 sqft home in Hillsborough CA; monthly utilities are about $1500.

They probably heat it selectively and still pay a lot in utilities. One of the photos of stairs looks like it has a fairly small HVAC so there are likely multiple systems for the whole building.

But why?

There is an apparently well preserved masonic library inside as well.

I won at auction and helped renovate a 90-year-old former sorority house. We started with an estimate of $300k and ended up at over a million dollars.

Every time I hear "we should estimate software like we estimate construction", I tell this story.

You can get wall units in some select areas and that should take care of things. If they previously had a house in San Diego they probably aren't hurting financially. I'm jealous of all the space, it almost seems like too much without putting in a gymnasium and skate park.

Historically the peaks of Freemasonry in America were around the time of the revolutionary war, civil war, and two world wars. Being a fraternity first and foremost - soldiers abroad found brotherhood and companionship together in freemasonry - their numbers soared around this time as new initiates joined. Since the 70's or so the fraternity has seen a steady decline of membership not to dissimilar to the decline of religious institutions.

Or an event hall, or a quirky hotel of sorts

sounds like a good way to lose more money :D

Better yet, a WeWork space.

that was my first thought. the upkeep will be expensive though

Yeah but this isn't a home. Most people don't want to buy a 20k masonic template and live it in. Given what the upkeep must be, your most likely buyers probably want to rent out the space to businesses. So it's priced according to what the demand is, which is apparently small.

I grew up in that part of the world and I can safely say nobody there has $89K laying around to make a purchase of this type (renovations aside, imagine heating the place). The absence of qualified buyers drive prices around there. People who have never been to the rural areas of the midwest simply have no perspective on the economics of that region. Its not impossible that the equity from their San Diego home sale made them the richest people in the county (I don't recall the town being mentioned in the article).

That article has a link to the family blog, which has a photo of a WWII postcard they found in the building (with the address, confirmed with Google Street View).

That's not even rural Indiana. It's a town within a 500,000 person metro area and about a 25 minute drive from the downtown of the central city, complete with skyscrapers and everything. The town itself has a very solid looking (streetview) walkable downtown area. I looked on Zillow and fixer-upper houses within a few blocks of this building are listed for $35,000 to $90,000. Really nice, immaculate homes in the area appear to sell for $150,000 or so.

My guess is that $89,000 is right on target for this area, and I'd bet they spend multiples of that on restoration.

rural rust belt

Location!