West Side Spiritualist Church
church in Ohio, United States
The West Side Spiritualist Church was a historic church building in Franklinton, Columbus, Ohio. The Spiritualist church was built in 1912 for the congregation of Harry Boerstler, who moved to the neighborhood in 1900 to bring hope to its working-class people. The congregation lasted until about 1948, and the building later housed the Boerstler Memorial Spiritualist Temple and the Greater Christ Temple Apostolic Church. After years of vacancy, the church building was approved to be demolished for affordable housing, to accompany an upscale mixed-use development nearby, despite opposition from preservationists.
History
The community Spiritualist church was founded in May 1901, in the home of Harry Boerstler at State and McDowell Streets. Boerstler had moved to the neighborhood in 1900 to provide hope, as well as something to believe in, for the working-class neighborhood. The building's land was deeded to the West Side Spiritualist Church by a congregation member in 1911, with a property value of $17,000. The only conditions were for $2,000, a memorial window dedicated to her, and expenses covered for her funeral.
The church was built in 1912, and dedicated in March of that year. It survived the Great Flood of 1913 which devastated the surrounding neighborhood.
“West Side Spiritualist Church” enters the record as church in Ohio, United States. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what West, Side and Spiritualist can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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“West Side Spiritualist Church” is worth following because a concise public description often conceals a longer documentary argument. Here, West, Side and Spiritualist provides the most credible route into that argument.
Maps, plans, fabric surveys and administrative records can establish how the site’s name, extent and function changed over time. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 22, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q104599519. Authority coordinates are 39.959, -83.013. None of the 1 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1912, 1900, 1948 and 1901.
Architectural summaries often privilege surviving fabric and can understate demolished phases, contested use or displaced communities. The source lead contains qualifying language; that uncertainty should survive quotation, summary and reuse. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.
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This entry incorporates text from “West Side Spiritualist Church” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.