Hackensack church to celebrate pipe organ's rebirth 45 years after fire
HACKENSACK — A church that suffered a devastating fire 45 years ago that severely damaged its pipe organ will celebrate the organ’s rebirth with a Christmas Eve concert.
The choral evensong, planned for Sunday at 10:30 p.m. at Christ Episcopal Church in Hackensack, will highlight the instrument's beauty and sound, which have been painstakingly restored over the past three years.
“There’s nothing else like it — you feel the sound,” said Mark Wright, the church’s music director, who worked on the instrument with a group of volunteers. “You become part of the instrument because it shakes the floor. To me, it’s an auditory reminder that there are forces way beyond us.”
In May, the church celebrated the progress Wright and the volunteers had made in restoring the instrument with a concert.
They had repaired much of the organ's innards, including many of its pipes, scraping off and replacing the crumbling old leather at the end of the pipes. To allow people to climb inside the wooden case and safely navigate its interior, Wright’s brother and nephew, who are cabinet makers, built ladders and walkways with banisters.
Since then, they have built a case for the part of the organ that was damaged in the fire, using black walnut — the same wood as the main case — and following the same design. And the wooden pipes in the part of the organ known as a positiv, some of which are still charred, have been restored.
“We brought back to life the pipes that burned, those pipes somebody saved 45 years ago,” said Wright, a retired high school English teacher. “This will be the first time people are hearing those pipes again.”
The work began in 2020 when Wright peeked inside the instrument out of curiosity. When he came to the church two years earlier, people told him the old organ was hopeless, but he and the group of volunteers he calls the “leatherchicks” took on the daunting restoration project.
There are some parts of the organ that are not “speaking yet,” Wright said. The group hopes to complete the work by September.
“It’s been a huge project,” he said. “It exhausts every possible bit of knowledge and energy I’ve got, but it’s so satisfying. And this little crew, we’ve become very close.”
The concert on Christmas Eve falls exactly 45 years to the day after a fire swept through the church’s parish hall and damaged the organ in 1978. The fire was reportedly set by three young boys who stayed in a nearby shelter and were upset when their parents did not pick them up as promised for the holiday, Wright said.
Seven ranks of pipes, about 300 in all, were severely damaged. The pipes that were salvageable were stowed away in the church's cellar.
The concert Sunday will feature Christmas carols and the performance of a hymn Wright wrote from the perspective of the burned pipes to celebrate the newly revived part of the organ, called “We are the Pipes who Sing for Christ.”
“What is Christmas but the memorial and annual celebration of the birth of a baby? Even in the darkest days of the year, there is hope,” he said. “We’ve taken an organ that was said to be hopeless, that nothing could be done, and brought it back. This is the rebirth of our baby.”
This article originally appeared on NorthJersey.com: Hackensack church's organ to play once more on Christmas Eve
