A former St. Louis Public Schools building in north St. Louis that’s been vacant for two decades is now set to get new life as an addiction treatment and recovery center.
The roughly $22.7 million rehabilitation of the old Eliot School by Jubilee Community Development Corp. will establish the Jubilee Wellness Center, with room for 75 beds to help men recovering from substance use disorder.
“Everybody is affected by the fentanyl epidemic,” said Andy Krumsieg, administrative pastor of Jubilee Community Church. “It hits every family. Almost all of us know somebody that has been addicted [to opioids].”
Krumsieg said he sees many people in the neighborhoods around Jubilee Community Church, located at 4231 N. Grand Blvd., contend with the challenges of substance use, mental illness or homelessness. Sometimes it’s a combination of all three, he added.
“They have no place to go,” he said, adding that means many often seek refuge in vacant or abandoned buildings or sleep in the open.
But the new wellness center, once completed, will offer a place to facilitate recovery from addiction in a region that only has a handful of detox beds, Krumsieg said.
“We won’t be an official detox center, but we’ll do 90% of what a detox center will do,” he said. “We just don’t have the medical level of what is happening in a detox center.”
The development project marries desperately needed addiction recovery services with the revitalization of the one of the first school buildings designed by prolific St. Louis architect William B. Ittner, said Joel Fuoss, principal at Trivers, the architect firm on this project.
“To do this in a new building, it would be successful from their programming,” he said. “But metaphorically it wouldn’t quite resonate the same.”
The school, built in 1898, has sat empty since 2004. Jubilee Community Development Corp. acquired the building in July 2022, according to city records.
The building’s exterior hides those two decades of vacancy well; the wear over that time becomes more apparent on the inside.
Small pieces of rubble blanket the floors, betraying any nearby footsteps, and tiny cracks ripple through the old lead paint peeling away from the walls it used to cover. Immense and intricate graffiti stamps the insides of different cavernous rooms.
But just beneath these surface layers is a remarkably solid building for its century-and-a-quarter age. Fuoss notes there’s hardly any evidence that the building is in need of stabilization.
“The building is sitting on the bedrock, which is why you don’t see a lot of settlement,” he said. “The bones [and] the core are strong — a lot of things you could say about north St. Louis. The core is there, it needs a lot of the other attention, and a lot of that’s doable. It just takes some work and some money.”
The symbolism of the project to restore a beautiful and prominent building is not lost on Fuoss.
“What it says to restore some of your architectural treasures is imperative to [what] it says to the rest of the community,” he said. “For that to be ignored and to just let it go to waste also has a statement too.”
Already some eight to 10 40-yard dumpsters of debris have been removed from the building, Krumsieg said. While walking through, he points out different elements waiting to be restored, like an old Tuskegee Airmen mural and some of the original flooring.
Krumsieg expects construction will take 12 to 15 months to complete, but there’s still the challenge of getting all of the funding together for the project. St. Louis’ Community Development Administration has already allocated money to the project and could award more in the future.
The project will also apply for New Markets Tax Credits, Historic Tax Credits and congressional appropriation, Krumsieg said. He said the amount of financing from those sources will determine what kind of fundraising is needed.
“We welcome partnership from anywhere and everywhere, but nobody is coming to save us, and we have to have our skin in the game,” he said. “And we do.”
Krumsieg added it’s no different from many of the other projects the church has taken on in recent decades, including an organic farm, launching a lawn care and landscaping business, managing hundreds of apartments and establishing addiction recovery homes.
“Virtually everything we’ve taken on, we didn’t have the resources to do it,” he said. “But we knew we should do it and we went forward knowing that things would come together.”
This new facility will extend the addiction treatment and recovery services Jubilee already provides by offering a place of employment for those who are moving through the program, Krumsieg said.
This is a critical part of the church’s approach to addiction recovery, which has helped hundreds of people, said Bryan Moore, senior pastor at Jubilee Community Church.
Ample examples of success telegraph hope and a starting point for those who need help, and Moore said many of the men who go through Jubilee’s recovery program become leaders in it and can help guide others to recovery with an intimate understanding of that challenge.
“It’s very important for us to have these success stories because any time a man comes in and he’s saved, he goes back out there and gets five or 10 other men,” he said.
The new facility in the revitalized school will house the first phases of recovery, while the final phases will shift to the roughly 45 beds Jubilee already has across four recovery homes, Moore said.
He admits the church’s recent success in responding to addiction in the community came after years of too many community members dying from opioid overdoses in the north St. Louis neighborhoods that surround Jubilee.
“I was losing men that looked up to me, that respected me and who called me pastor,” Moore said. “We literally, not figuratively, stepped over bodies of men that we were responsible for.”
Moore calls this “the price of ignorance,” in responding to a struggle that he and his church saw frequently but in ways that weren’t effective, he said.
“Being overly spiritual about a very practical condition,” Moore said.
The COVID-19 pandemic shutdowns offered Moore and the leaders at Jubilee time and space to reflect and determine if their programs to help north St. Louisans suffering from substance use were working, he said. Moore also took note of the number of churches concentrated in north city and questioned if his organization was really benefiting the community.
“Maybe there’s so many sick people because there’s so many churches that had overpromised and underdelivered, and were ill equipped to handle the true measure of the problem,” he said.
Coming out of the pandemic, Moore said he and his church resolved to address addiction and the root causes of it in the community differently than before. In 2021, they welcomed a mobile clinic from the Assisted Recovery Center of America and in 2022, built out a physical space for the addiction recovery provider, Moore said.
“We realized [people with substance use disorder were] coming through the door, instead of just feeding [them], let’s treat [them],” he said. “Because [they] were coming through the door constantly.”
Krumsieg said the addiction recovery programming shifted to focusing first on the way addiction affects someone’s physical body and mind.
“Oftentimes as Christians we have tried to do the theology part as the foundation,” he said. “While it is the foundation, it can’t be the first thing you work on.”
Moore explained their partnership with ARCA helps get those in the community dependent on substances access to Naltrexone (also known as Vivitrol), an opioid antagonist that binds to the opioid receptors in the brain without activating them.
“You can’t get high if you wanted to,” he said. “You can OD, but you can’t get high.”
It provides the time and space for Moore and leaders in the church’s addiction recovery program, many of whom he said were once dependent on opioids themselves, to help others address the trauma that may have contributed to the addiction over time. Then they can pay it forward.
“Most of the men who go through this program, they don’t leave,” he said. “They become stakeholders in the community. They become invested in the community and watch out for the other men.”
