LOUISVILLE, Ky. — Crews in Louisville battled a three-alarm fire in downtown Wednesday at a historic church that now remains in shambles.

Louisville Fire Department said roughly 60 firefighters helped tame and put the fire out.

St. Paul’s German Evangelical Church on East Broadway goes back to the 1900s.

“St. Paul’s German Evangelical Church, they were holding Sunday services in the German language two weeks before we entered World War I, and were fighting the German Kaiser,” said Tom Owen, an archivist of UofL. “And that was a monument to their upward mobility of that congregation, a German-speaking congregation that by the 1950s had joined the United Church of Christ.” 

He said the congregation grew in the 1900s, and as part of the expansion, a Louisville architect firm designed the Late Gothic Revival style church that opened in 1906.

“Then, since their numbers started dying off, no longer living east of downtown or even south of Broadway, moving further and further into the suburbs, they closed in about 1995 and merged with the Bethel United Church of Christ in downtown Saint Matthew’s,” Owen said.

In the mid-1990s, he said the church remained empty and a proposal was submitted to tear down the church and turn it into a parking lot for the medical center. That didn’t sit well.

“And so, they protested, got the building designated for the National Register,” Owen said.

For a historic landmark filled with memories, Owen believes now, after the fire, the place will be demolished.

“So you want to be gentle and want to be responsible in maintaining those properties, even when they’re empty and even when they do not have an immediate use. And so the city has got to ride owners harder to avoid what I think’s going to happen here. And that is demolition by neglect,” Owen said.

The Louisville Fire Department continues to investigate the cause of the fire from Wednesday night.