Church recycler, founding IABCN member Bob Beaty, seeks new use for wrecked sanctuaries

As the excavating machine from Jim Johnson’s Tamco Construction,  trucked from Pipersville, knocked down Our Mother of Sorrows — church and school, rectory and convent — for a developer to replace the Bridgeport parish with hilltop homes, salvager Bob Beaty was impressed by how immigrants had built the place to last.

“We thought it would be mostly wood. But it’s steel,” Beaty said. The vast rubbled yard held beams stacked like bones, bricks, concrete blocks, marble, pipes. Johnson’s crew left a stone frame, carved with “Ave Maria,” for Beaty to cart to his shop on American Street in Philadelphia.

Beaty sold columns from Transfiguration in West Philly to a Kennett-area collector, and recycled the Divine Lorraine when the hotel was gutted among other treasures, sacred and profane.

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