Note: this is an expanded, revised, and modified version of a piece originally published in the Yale Architectural Journal, Perspecta, issue no. 53, 2020.
ORATORY BETHLEHEM: BIRDVILLE CHURCH AND HOUSE WONDERFUL
I don’t remember exactly when or where I first heard about Birdville Church, but I do remember that once I heard, I couldn’t forget it. Like all good true stories, I didn’t know how much was folk-tale and how much was based in fact. The earliest version I remember told that around 1914, a man in New Jersey had built a small church by hand, meant not only to save human souls but to attract and house wild birds. I filed it away in the back of mind as a place to investigate sometime. My wife Mandy, an avid gardener and botanist, enjoys the occasional trip to the New Jersey Pine Barrens to search for rare plant specimens, so on July 2011, we decided to make a day of visiting “Birdsville Church”[1] on the way to the Pine Barrens.
Parking nearby, we approached a structure overgrown with weeds and vines. It looked like some temple built by an ancient monastic sect, plopped down on an obscure corner in an Ocean County, New Jersey neighborhood, otherwise populated by vinyl-sided tract houses. With its fluted concrete columns, Moorish arches, and embellished tile inlay, it looked like a miniature roadside Hagia Sophia. It was being used by a trash removal company for equipment storage. There was something sublimely incongruous about this wholly unique and weirdly imposing building, designed as a sacred space, now only used only to protect sundry tools and a forklift. That afternoon, we spent some time poking around, peering over the fence and taking pictures of the poured concrete structure. It was clearly built using a technique similar to Henry Mercer’s Fonthill Castle in Doylestown, Pennsylvania and was decorated copiously with Mercer’s Moravian tiles.
Henry Mercer and The Arts and Crafts Movement in the Mid-Atlantic
Located approximately 68 miles from Toms River, Fonthill and its attendant Moravian Pottery and Tile Works are masterpieces of poured-concrete architecture. The two buildings were designed by Harvard educated archaeologist, historian and craftsman Henry Chapman Mercer (1856–1930) and were completed in 1912. Mercer was an American proponent of the Arts and Crafts movement propagated by William Morris and John Ruskin, and many of the “Moravian tiles” manufactured at Mercer’s workshop were based on medieval designs, which he encountered during research expeditions in England. The Arts and Crafts movement was a marriage of both political and aesthetic concerns, and many of its advocates looked to the medieval guild system — in the absence of feudal landowners and a monarchy –as a potential way to organize humane labor conditions. One of John Ruskin’s most repeated quotes — “Life without Industry is guilt, and Industry without Art is brutality”[2] serves well to sum up the spirit with which Mercer approached life and labor. Fonthill contains 44 rooms and 18 fireplaces, all encrusted with thousands of Mercer’s tiles and mosaics. While Mercer himself participated in the building process, he also relied on an experienced work crew on hand, to aid with both physical labor and engineering quandaries.
While there are striking similarities, the little sanctuary in Toms River has important differences to Fonthill and the Moravian Tile Workshop. Birdville is clearly an improvised structure and the builder clearly lacked the budget and labor force available to Mercer. The ornament is much simpler. Alongside the Moravian tiles are various decorative elements and cross designs composed simply of small stones and pebbles, a technique not employed by Mercer. Our brief visit to this neglected shrine was awe-inspiring. We left fascinated but with little more knowledge than the scraps and rumors available online.
Exploring Birdville
Later, as she was inspecting the photographs of Birdville’s facade, Mandy noticed a crucial detail–a phone number for the trash removal business visible on the window of a forklift parked in the lot. To our delight and surprise, the foreman who answered when we called agreed to show us around. We arranged to meet on-site.
There are a number of photographs of Birdville available online, including several taken for the Library of Congress circa 1991, but none are of the interior. Whatever awaited us would be a complete surprise.
As we arrived, accompanied by a few local New Jersey historians and friends, we were led through a large, newly-installed, out-of-place garage door that led into a damp, dark and musty space that felt like it hadn’t seen a full ray of sunlight in a century. The building had the atmosphere of a sacrosanct catacomb, the movie set of a fictional cult or an abandoned funhouse, all while cluttered with trash removal equipment. We meandered through in the dark, finding our way by flashlight, camera flash and the dim glint of the sun that filtered in through the tar-patched pinnacle of the collapsing concrete dome.
The building was modest. The focal point was a central domed chapel with a few smaller rooms off to the side. It was breath-taking, despite, or even perhaps due to, its state of neglect, and above the doorway, the chapel’s name was inscribed in tile — Oratory Bethlehem. The marks of the wood used to first form the concrete were still visible, and the entirety of the interior was a constellation not only of Moravian tiles but also pebbles, pieces of broken china and other small decorative elements. There was a rounded fireplace, and an archway beyond that led to what clearly was once an altar, now profaned by use as a shelf. Several painted silhouettes of dancing girls, perhaps added later, adorned one of the walls. Hollowed out of the roof were several niches, which we instinctively assumed to be birdbaths although upon later reflection, we deduced that they could have also been planters. Despite the sagging roof and the damp, the structure seemed sound. Only the occasional piece of metal rod framing was visible — a testament to the craftsmanship for whomever built what was so clearly a labor of love.
ALBERT P. GREIM
OCCUPATION: BIRD MAN
Birdville was the life’s work of Albert P. Greim, also sometimes known as Albert Crescent, as per the name of his business, the Crescent Company. Like its Renaissance man founder, the Crescent Company was many things: a vaudeville theater, a rustic furniture business, an artisanal birdhouse manufacturer and the entity who administered Birdville. During its heyday, Birdville immediately became an incredibly versatile, multi-use structure and can be interpreted today in a similarly multi-faceted way.
Day to day, the building was used as a home for Greim, a wild bird aviary and a workshop for his theatrical and architectural side projects. Yet, Birdville also served as an important community hub in Toms River. Greim was an active and involved community member; accordingly, Birdville became an active church and meeting place. Because Greim was an Episcopalian minister and vestryman at Christ Church, several weddings were performed within Birdville’s walls. Similarly, Greim was a member of the Toms River Borough Council and also served as Justice of the Peace. Thus, Birdville became the home of multiple town planning meetings. Architecturally, beyond its personal and community use, Birdville was also notable as an early example of the “roadside attraction” or inventive storefront that emerged as a uniquely American architectural typology during the automobile age. In the years since it fell into disuse, Birdville’s significance has become even clearer: an overlooked, materially innovative example of a visionary environment, constructed single-handedly by one self-taught polymath.[3] In this way, Birdville is similar, not in style but in spirit, to Simon Rodia’s Watt’s Towers in South Los Angeles or Ferdinand Cheval’s Le Palais Idéal in France. It may be humble in comparison to its contemporary poured-concrete structures such as nearby Fonthill, but it was built and designed entirely by Greim with the aid of one assistant.
Greim was born in 1863 and grew up in Pennsylvania. During his twenties, he moved to various locations within Pennsylvania and New Jersey, taking jobs as a “moulder” and carpenter before establishing his small “rustic furniture” business in Cedar Brook, NJ in 1906.”[4] Greim’s father was a carpenter; so, it’s no surprise that his son would follow this path, though he seems to have gravitated early to an Arts and Crafts aesthetic and not simply layman carpentry. In addition to his aptitude for carpentry, Greim was known from the beginning as an authority on birds, especially chickens.
In the Millbrook Roundtable of Sat. Feb. 25, 1893, he dispensed poultry advice, lovingly recounting:
[…] I remember well when I was first interested in chickens how I used to warm bricks and bury them deep down in the dust and then, after it was well warmed up, see the fun. […] It is true, they will make the house very dusty, but it is a great comfort to them.[5]
When he reported for jury duty, The New Jersey Courier recorded him as A.P. Greim. Occupation: Bird Man.
During his early days in Cedar Brook, The New Jersey Courier reliably reported on Greim’s business growth and success, noting:
Oct. 10, 1913:
The Crescent Company, which builds rustic bird boxes in Berkely, has bought a lot further down the pike and will build a bigger factory.[6]
Construction of what is today called “Birdville” had begun by 1915, but the main feature, reported in the local press as of 1916, was the expansion of the workshop. The unique dynamic of Greim’s workshop was fostered by both his own personality (Greim was a musician), as well as his apparent interest in the Arts and Crafts ideal of blurring the lines between the artist and craftsperson and of creating dignified, meaningful work for laborers. Thus, Greim’s small “factory” included music and would be:
Heated by a hot water plant, and has what is seldom found in a factory, a big open fireplace, with benches around it, and an Angelus player piano. For Mr. Greim believes in enjoying life as he goes along, and in having everybody around him enjoy it.[8]
Greim did not write extensively, and the only clues as to his socio-political outlook must be gleaned from scant texts found in Crescent Company catalogues, as well as the occasional advertisement. He was prolific with the production of his circulars, catalogues and promotional postcards. He patented a sparrow trap, waging a holy war on this specific species. In one particularly florid postcard, he characterized English Sparrows as “Bolsheviki Birds,” which would destroy all others if not eliminated:
All good bird lovers advocate destroying the English sparrow. It is that, or, having no other birds at all in a few years.[9]
Greim also chides the Women’s Suffrage movement in a catalogue titled Bird Architecture:
This last summer I read of a woman, who claimed that she assisted, in fact, built most of the nest of a pair of song sparrows that she said did not know how to build their nest. And since she claimed that the male bird was particularly stupid, I judge that the article was written by a Suffragette.[10]
While Greim bristled at the notion of a suspected suffragette coming to the aid of the Bolsheviki Birds, his life’s work, intentionally or not, was the very embodiment of the explicitly socio-political credo at the heart of the Arts and Crafts movement. Some of the foundational precepts of the movement share several points of contact with those advanced by Marx and Engels, sparrows notwithstanding.
The Socio-Political Ideals of the Arts and Crafts Movement
The Arts and Crafts movement was defined by a romantic idealization of Pre-Industrial handcraft traditions. While remembered primarily as an aesthetic movement, it was imbued with and animated by a critique of industrial capitalism. The criticism was akin to that advanced by other contemporary labor movements. The Industrial Revolution, far from improving quality of life through technological innovation, had instead created masses of grossly exploited laborers, alienated from the products they manufactured, benefitting only their bosses and the wealthy factory owners. The appeal of the movement to artists and artisans specifically came from its particular focus on the fact that one of the evils of the industrial system was that it robbed the workers of pride in their work, the sense of a job well done. These beneficial working conditions presumably existed in a Pre-Industrial world when a worker may put a slightly individual “spin” on a handcrafted object or be renowned for a specialized skill. Further, the movement, as articulated by William Morris and John Ruskin, railed against the soulless, uniform factory as itself a dehumanizing force — both of people and of art. The focus of the movement on artistry and the importance of beauty in a healthy society led to its adoption by many members of the affluent classes. While largely ignoring the labor critique, this privileged population could see the appeal of surrounding themselves with handcrafted furniture and goods. In an ironic twist, the mass-produced factory goods became anathema to this elite subset able to indulge in the Arts and Crafts “lifestyle.” To illustrate this inherent disconnect between the ideals and the manifestation of the movement, the majority of “Arts and Crafts” houses, which were designed to harmonize with their natural surroundings, included a maid’s quarters.
Albert Greim stands as a rare example of a working-class person who fully embraced the handcraft elements of the Arts and Crafts movement, and he organized his entire life in a way that would have been consonant with the movement, as envisioned by its founders. It should be emphasized that he said he never owned a factory but, rather, a “workshop.” Furthermore, the descriptions of the workshop, with its player piano and articulated sense of camaraderie, fit well within the Arts and Crafts doctrine of cultivating meaningful, fulfilling labor, while producing objects of beauty, emphasizing the hand of the worker.
Poured Concrete as Ancient and Radical Material
While it is clear that Greim greatly admired Henry Chapman Mercer — and was a collector of his Moravian tiles — the two contemporaries seem not to have been closely acquainted. The only scrap I could locate in Mercer’s extensive archival records comes as an aside in a letter dated Oct. 22, 1925 from Philadelphia-based lawyer William E. Stokes, who was writing in connection to one of Mercer’s anthropological research projects. In the midst of the letter, Stokes mentions that
In visiting Pine Beach, New Jersey, where we have a summer cottage, we went to Toms River where Mr. A.P. Greim has a workshop for the manufacture of rustic bird boxes and where he is building his home and private chapel, which are all most interesting. I found that Mr. Greim was a modest disciple of yours. […] I rather take it for granted that you know of Mr. Greims [sic] at Toms River, but on the off chance that you may not have seen it I enclose herewith a post card of the beginning of his concrete building — that of his workshop.[11]
The postcard mentioned by Stokes is not present in Mercer’s archive, and Greim’s name is nowhere to be found in Fonthill’s guest registry book or in the customer invoice records. While it’s hard to imagine Mercer would have been totally unaware of Greim’s activities, there is no evidence that Greim was an intentional acolyte following Mercer’s lead, or that Mercer saw him as any sort of understudy or apprentice.
Instead, Greim was a contemporary who followed a similar path, shaped by the same prevailing zeitgeist as Mercer. Their shared use of poured concrete illustrates this. Cement Age magazine featured Greim’s early poured concrete work at Cedar Brook in 1908, the same year that Mercer began work on Fonthill. Greim’s workshop was not just a commonplace building. Like Mercer, he had become fascinated by the possibilities of poured concrete, and the magazine, which also often reported on the activities of Henry Mercer, gave this report:
The accompanying illustrations show some interesting work in concrete construction and they are presented here because the work is unusual rather than typical. It was done by A.P. Greim, Cedar Brook, N.J., manufacturer of rustic ware. He has been much interested in the ornate possibilities of concrete and has made numerous experiments in that line.
Poured concrete architecture was all the rage during this time — as exemplified by the existence of periodicals such as Cement Age itself, which had begun publication in 1902.
Cement was used extensively in antiquity. It was a commonplace material in ancient Rome. Yet by the era of the medieval guilds, so idealized by the Arts and Crafts movement, its use was rare, essentially vanishing from the architectural lexicon. The 18th century saw a rediscovery of cement, and various concrete formulas began to be refined. However, the real breakthrough came later, when people around the world appear to have simultaneously come upon the idea of pouring concrete over iron (and later steel) bars to form “reinforced concrete.”[12] This enabled concrete to be formed into almost any shape or design imaginable, leading to a veritable explosion of public excitement and experimentation. There was a belief by many that all buildings of the future would be constructed of poured concrete. There is a slight irony in the technique being adopted heartily by Arts and Crafts adherents, as it was very much seen as part and parcel of the modernization of contemporary society. That said, its appeal as a medium is easy to see. It offered a way to construct truly unique structures as readily as it lent itself to potential mass-production. On the opposite end of the spectrum from Greim and Mercer, Thomas Edison designed a prototype and proposed the construction of mass-produced “pour to order” homes, securing a patent for this idea in 1908. A 1910 article described the plan:
The plan which Mr. Edison has been working is, briefly, the completion of a set of steel molds which can be used time after time in pouring houses. […] Mr. Edison and his engineers claim that such a house can be built for $1200. […] A common objection to the Edison house is based on artistic grounds. It is said all houses look alike and that a whole row of houses, built by one set of plans, would result in painful monotony.[13]
Edison’s plan was a dismal failure, though he did manage to complete several clusters of the houses. The implementation was unworkable, but Edison was ahead of his time in envisioning something similar to what would come to be called “tract housing” during the Levittown projects of the 1940s. It’s hard to imagine any architectural style more diametrically opposed to the Arts and Crafts aesthetic. To this day, the “tract” style houses near Birdville offer a study in contrasts. Poured reinforced concrete was a new tool, and it could be used to construct austere, alienating architecture or unique, artistically wrought gems, such as Fonthill, Birdville, or Frank Lloyd Wright’s Fallingwater (which required extensive renovation after Wright initially failed to employ an adequate amount of steel reinforcement). Albert Greim was a fellow traveler alongside Henry Mercer and Thomas Edison in exploring the possibilities of poured reinforced concrete. When recounting memories of Birdville, Greim’s single assistant, C. Stanley “Cap” Grover [14] noted Greim’s painstaking attention to detail in concrete. He recalled digging white sugar sand, abundant in the Toms River area, with Greim, because Birdville’s creator preferred its color in a concrete mix.
Back to Nature
In addition to the Arts and Crafts ethos and the shared material exploration, there was yet another philosophical connection between Greim and Mercer: their shared connections to the “Back to Nature” movement.
In a 1979 remembrance of Greim and Birdville, a staff writer for the Asbury Park Press wrote that
In a “back to nature movement” in 1914, Albert F.[sic] Greim selected a site […] to serve as a bird sanctuary and a workshop for the manufacture of rustic bird houses.[15]
Greim himself, in a Crescent Company catalogue, used this language to describe his mission and the appeal of his birdhouses:
There are several things to be said in favor of rustic bird houses, particularly of the sweet smelling Jersey cedar, which is a disinfectant in itself. If you are sufficiently interested, nail up a rustic bird house alongside a brightly painted one, and see which they will select. It is the “back to nature movement” among the birds. Where did they nest before civilized man inhabited this country? In hollow trees, woodpeckers and their kind boring their own [sic] in dead trees. Now such suitable places are fast disappearing under the pruning and slashing axe of man.[16]
As for the Back to Nature movement among humans, its origins are usually traced to German youth groups collectively called Wandervögel, which translates to “wandering bird” or “bird of passage.” These groups began spontaneously around 1896, rising to the height of their popularity in Germany between 1901 and 1914. There was an apparent influence on worldwide “scouting” movements, as well as quasi-political organizations, such as the Kindred of the Kibbo Kift — a UK based Back to Nature sect founded in 1920 with a focus on hand-craftsmanship and an Arts and Crafts aesthetic. While some Back to Nature groups emphasized nationalism or espoused right-wing political views, there emerged no clear consensus among them. Strains of anarchistic individualism permeated even the nationalist groups, while others were overtly anti-authoritarian and lacked any emphasis on nationalism or “traditional” values. Across socio-political lines, the movement emphasized individual autonomy and often what would today be called “countercultural” values. Urban living was viewed as morally corrupting and spiritually corrosive. A retreat to a “simpler” time and an abstract “re-connection” with nature, believed to have been lost in the rise of industrialization, were also unifying themes. The ideological connections to the Arts and Crafts movement are apparent.
The movement also emphasized environmental preservation, and this sentiment was especially pronounced among ornithologists and birdwatchers. Activists within these communities became involved in crusades against feather merchants, poachers and wild bird hunters. Aside from their mutual fascination with the possibilities of poured concrete and a love of ornate tilework, Henry Mercer shared with Greim a passion for birds. He designated Fonthill’s grounds an arboretum and bird sanctuary in his will, and was an outspoken opponent of the plume trade, railing against it in an 1897 article titled Fashion’s Holocaust, the Destruction of Birds by Women’s Hat Fashion.[17]
Greim’s Invisible Legacy
Greim can be situated neatly in a historic context, but he was, above all, a unique and singular personality. Unfortunately, while Birdville has remained as a roadside curiosity in Toms River, most of the distinctive history of its creator has been lost.
None of Greim’s trademark birdhouses, which were widely acclaimed and showcased at the Panama-Pacific Exposition of 1915 in San Francisco, are known to survive. Greim donated two examples to the “Decorative Arts Department” at the Newark Museum of Newark, NJ. An accession record lists them as “Gift of Albert Crescent, 1915,” along with brief descriptions:
Wood with bark. Slanting roof. Twig attached to front.
Wood with bark. Slanting roof. Contains nest of former occupant.
Inquiring as the current whereabouts of these birdhouses in 2017, I received this response:
We have no location listed on those records so the birdhouse [sic] are “lost in inventory”. We also have no photographs of those objects. […]
My colleague from the Newark Public Library has gotten back to me. She has no records of these photographs in her files. She believes that they may have been treated as ephemera, filed in the information files, which have long since been weeded.[18]
A 1933 article profiling Greim and Birdville makes a passing mention of his success “as attested to today by the letters and papers in an old file in the workshop.”[19] Presumably, at some point, these were lost or destroyed along with whatever histories they chronicled.
There is a strange sadness in the fact that not one of Greim’s thousands of birdhouses — not one of the many mail-ordered all over the globe, or collected by Japanese Emperor Taishō [20], is known to have survived the passage of time. Even archival photographs were, at some point, “treated as ephemera” and “weeded.”
Another detail lost to time, which can only be guessed at, are specifics of Greim’s spiritual beliefs. Episcopalian religious dogma in Greim’s time was relatively flexible, and the Church did not historically frown upon Freemasonry. Greim was a Freemason and member of the Grand Lodge of New Jersey, with a 1915 log book recording only that he had been expelled for some unstated reason.[21] Greim’s spiritual sense is articulated elegantly in his work at Birdville, and one could venture to guess that he felt a transcendent presence among his beloved song-birds and in the natural world. There is no known record of his philosophical or theological worldview, however, leaving everything but the barest facts to conjecture.
One intriguing connection that offers further contextualization of Griem’s life and work is his crossing of paths with Anton Lang (1875–1938). Lang was a Bavarian Catholic potter, craftsperson, and actor, usually remembered for his portrayal of the role of Jesus Christ in the world-renown Passion Play of his hometown in the Bavarian Alps, Oberammergau Village. This Passion Play had been enacted, according to local lore and records, every ten years since 1634. Lang came from a family of actors and assumed the role of Christ in the 1900, 1910, and 1922 performances. This afforded him a level of international acclaim, to the point that, for example, the press erroneously reported that he had been killed in trench warfare during WWI in 1915. His wife later claimed he did not serve in the war — he was a noted and vocal pacifist — but the mere fact that the press attempted to use his (invented) death as a point of propaganda speaks to the level of fame he commanded at this time.
Lang’s fame as “the Christus of Oberammergau” slightly overshadowed the fact that he was also an artisan of exactly the type Greim would have admired and aspired to be. Lang’s wife Mathilde (née Rutz) told the Philadelphia Inquirer in 1906 that her husband had originally intended to be a “stove builder by trade” — but Lang suffered from tuberculosis and his health apparently didn’t permit him to perform physically strenuous work involving cutting tile. As the article tells it “she explained that the enormous porcelain stoves we had seen all through Germany were made of tiles and that it was a distinct trade to set those tiles and put up the stoves, but, her husband’s lungs being weak, she had persuaded him to abandon this work and go into the manufacture of pottery instead. So he has built a small work shop and kiln back of his house and a small store in his house, where his wares are on sale.”[22]
During the holiday season of 1923/24 Lang and several of his fellow Passion Players embarked on a voyage to the United States in order to sell their various arts and crafts to raise funds for children in their village who had been orphaned or left destitute by the war. Lang made an immediate and unforgettable impression on America. As the only fluent English speaker in his entourage he became a de facto “spokesperson,” but he also attracted attention because of his statements of radical pacifism, religious tolerance, and his strikingly humble “bohemian” way of carrying himself. One headline announcing the arrival of the artisans carried the byline “Lang Smokes and Refuses to Assume Immortal Pose.” It is explained that
They have come to sell the pottery, the paintings and the wood carvings of Oberammergau because there is no market for such things in Germany, and Oberammergau, as all such German communities, is today close to starvation. They have fethced with them a great number of chests and boxes filled with their handicraft, which will be on sale in Grand Central Palace for two weeks beginning Saturday. They wanted it made clear that they would stage no scenes from the Passion Play nor deliver any lectures.
“Nor have we come to trade upon our renown for our own profit,” explained Mr. Lang.[23]
The Passion Play in which Lang played has long been criticized for anti-Semitic content, but in his statements to the press while in the US it’s easy to see why he apparently fell under the suspicion of the Nazi regime before his death in 1938. Part of Lang’s “Christmas message” interview as reported on December 23, 1923:
“We might have a paradise, here on this earth, […] if men would love another better.” […] “We have had in Europe the anti-Semite movement. That is bad — very bad. That made so much suffering and cruelty. It is over now, I think, and I hope it will not come again.” Lang offered the opinion that people of all religious tradtions were able to enter heaven, and seemed baffled by the racism and hatred so prominent in American society. When asked about the causes of hatred between groups of people, he answered that “One reason is lack of imagination. […] It is not seeing them and being unable to imagine them that makes hate.” “Then, too, there is the mistake of putting money, the material things, before everything else […] if you have no money at all, like so many of my people, you cannot get along! But you must not make it the first thing.”[24]
With his connections to handcraft and to the world of the stage, it’s easy to see why Greim would have found Lang an inspiring figure. The circumstances of their meeting are unknown, but the exhibit toured through April 19th 1924, where it wrapped up in Boston. While in Cincinnati, Lang threw pottery for the Rookwood Pottery Company, which was an important hub in the American Arts & Crafts revival. Everyone from Thomas Edison to President Coolidge met with the artisans, and it seems likely the meeting with Greim came during a break between Philadelphia and Boston, when, as Lang recorded in his memoir “The first of April brought an unpleasant surprise for us in the form of a terrific blizzard which howled through the streets and badly hampered the traffic. This of course meant a smaller attendance of visitors at our exhibition. At Wanamaker’s [Philadelphia] we heard the biggest organ in the world played by a blind artist to actual perfection. Dear friends took us down to Atlantic City to let us have some rest after the strenuous rush.”[25]
A 1933 article about Greim in the Camden Courier-Post describes him as “FRIEND OF ANTON LANG.” A description of the chapel makes note that “The roodscreen is surmounted by carved figures of Christ, the Virgin and 1st John, presented to Mr. Greim by Anton Lang, Christus of the Passion Players of Oberammergau.” [26]
The details of their relationship are entirely lost, but in imagining a conversation between Greim and Lang it’s easy to see the points of camaraderie, and helps in understanding who Greim was, when there are only scraps to tell the tale.
No One Could Wish for a Better Memorial: Birdville in Decline
During his lifetime, Greim combined his various interests into a body of work that offered him fulfillment on multiple levels — his business was his art was his church was his home. An October 1916 edition of the New Jersey Courier may have put it best:
[…] Now he has a much bigger and fireproof shop, and has planned it so that it can be extended if need be. Mr. Greims [sic] is more than a workman, he is an artist. He has a pride and joy in his work, and is continually working up new designs.[27]
Greim’s ambition was that Birdville would outlive him as a monument to his work and as a functioning church. A 1926 article conveyed his hopes:
Behind all this interesting detail of the house and the masterly skill in its construction there is a deeper story. It is the story of Mr. Greim’s heart and soul. He has pledged to go on with the house and the chapel and Stanley [his sole helper in the construction] has pledged to carry them on after him. Without fail the early morning mass on Sundays will continue for interminable years. Who knows but what Stanley will not leave successors to hand the traditions down to, and they in turn hand them over to others? And so on for ages to come with the solemnity and reverence of a crowdd [sic] parish. No one could wish for a better memorial than this to which Mr. Greim can look forward. It pleases him and makes him happy. It is in his own words, “As I wish it.”[28]
Three years after Greim’s death in 1930, a local paper ran what remains probably the fullest account of his life, related oddly enough in the context of a school field trip:
[…] When Mr. Greim first came to Toms River, his factory consisted of one small building […] Instead of building a home connected with the factory, in which to sleep Mr. Greim built a one room structure on stilts, up among the branches of a magnificent oak tree.
[…] Up in the branches of this big tree, he spent his nights, to be awakened at the first gray streaks of dawn by the singing of the birds he loved.[29]
Albert P. Greim was never married and had no children. Greim’s heir and assistant, Stanley Grover, kept Birdville, and the business afloat for a number of years after Greim passed, but the Great Depression forced Grover to cut his losses, and Birdville began a slow decades-long decline. As of 1933 “Mr. and Mrs. Charles J. Terrell” had charge of the property, having been given a “lifetime contract” by Grover. Mr. Terrell told a journalist that he was working to keep the place in order, maybe even revive the business. He mentioned that “The organ, despite the dampness of the concrete in a shore town, was in fairly good condition when we opened up.”[30] The arrangement didn’t last, however, and in 1938 Grover sold the property to Joseph Gerue who continued a modest birdhouse business. In 1949, the property changed hands yet again; it was sold to Harry Duckworth, a former mayor of Island Heights. Duckworth remembered this as the time when the property began to seem more like a ruin:
Soon after I took it over, the organ was stripped apart by vandals. Then I had the chapel deconsecrated by a minister. It had been the scene of several weddings years before but there was no longer a need for it.[31]
By 1979, Birdville was left much as it is today, becoming a storage space for a construction company. Jane Homer, the wife of the owner of the construction business, described it as an empty and intimidating:
It’s an eerie place. I’ve only spent five minutes in there. Except for a thing which looks like a sacrificial altar, there is very little there.[32]
As with many things in life, what remains or matters at Birdville is a question of perception, dependent on personal knowledge and what has been transcribed into history. Yet our built environment is largely shaped by people who can often mobilize large amounts of time, capital and manpower to make their architectural ideas a reality.
Birdville stands in defiance of this. Seen through the arc of history, Birdville is an important work of self-taught architecture with unexamined yet important lessons about material exploration and radical ideals in architecture, buried in the vinyl-sided morass of suburban New Jersey. Many revered architects within the traditional historical canon rose to recognition because their work was their manifesto. It showed what they believed in and the ideas that they wished to advance in the world. For many, their work was ignored while they were alive and celebrated only after their death. In this light, what is the responsibility of the historian — to dig, to uncover and to elevate the buildings and landscapes that have been relegated to footnotes of history?
Self-taught architecture, like that of Albert Greim, is “a type of architecture that features unique designs made by builders with no formal training.”[33] Linked not by style or time period, self-taught architecture is considered as a movement in which the ideology of its creator, often seen as someone on the margins of traditional society, is embodied in the physical creation of a structure through the monumental, often life-long efforts, of that one single person. In a global context today, where buildings are increasingly thought of as scalable, replicable consumer products that are churned out at quick speeds for quick profit, Birdville is unrepeatable, solitary and deviant, not just a shelter for human souls but a site for multi-species communion, radical politics and aesthetic discovery. Today, Birdville stands as a testament to invention, handcraft, personal risk, material exploration and to the growth of a wholly original style that is nonetheless deeply steeped in the traditions and techniques of its time.
Within the footnotes and discarded newspaper clippings that surround Greim’s life, there are stories of integrity, grit and an unwillingness to compromise. There are also lessons that we could learn from today: the innovative reuse of found and discarded materials and a commitment to making space in our built environment to be shared by both animals and humans. On any given day, one can witness flocks of tiny English Sparrows chirping happily among the concrete pillars of the Oratory Bethlehem, “House Wonderful,” — Birdville.
[1] This variation is an example of how information slowly changes over time. References to Birdville in local press began to use “Birdsville” at some point in the 1990s. While I don’t recall what my first introduction to the story was, I do remember initially hearing it described as “Birdsville.” This likely began with the presence of a blue and white hand-painted sign installed on the property (at an unknown date, and removed as of 2015), which read “Est. 1914 Birdsville Church.”
[2] John Ruskin, Lectures on Art (London: George Allen 1904) p. 112.
[3] Greim did have the help of one assistant, Stanley “Cap” Grover.
[4] An 1887 residency listing has him living in Reading PA., with the occupation of “moulder.” The 1900 census has him in Pennsylvania. By 1910, he was in New Jersey . The Industrial Directory of NJ locates Greim in Cedar Brook, noting, Greim, A.V., manufacturer of rustic furniture, employs four persons.
[5] A.P. Greim, Maple Shade Poultry Papers IX: Hen Houses and Furniture for Same, Millbrook Roundtable, Sat. Feb. 25, 1893.
[6] NJ Courier, 10/10/1913, p. 5.
[7]Ibid., 12/25/1914, p. 5
[8] “Big New Shop at Birdville,” New Jersey Courier, Oct. 20 1916, p. 1.
[9]Albert Crescent (Albert P. Greim), Bird Architecture, n.d., probably ca. 1915. p. 42.
[10] Ibid. p. 23.
[11] William E. Stokes to Henry Chapman Mercer, October 22, 1925. Mercer Museum Research Library, Doylestown, PA. (Correspondence — Series 1, Folder 12.6)
[12] The first (recorded) “rebar” concrete building was the Arctic Oil Company Works warehouse in San Francisco, completed in 1884.
[13] “The Edison Cement House,” Keith’s Magazine, Vol. XXIV, №1, July 1910. p. 309.
[14] Stanley Grover later became Ocean County Surrogate.
[15] James F. Lowney, “Birdville Flutters Into Oblivion in South Toms River, “ Asbury Park Press, Sun. March 4, 1979, p. G6.
[16] Albert Crescent (Albert P. Greim), Bird Architecture, n.d., probably ca. 1915. p. 27.
[17] “The Mercer Tiles and Other Matters,” House Beautiful, Vol. 14, June — Nov. 1913 p. 79.
[18] Newark Museum accession records included as part of two email messages to the author, quoted here in part, dated 7/25/2017 from William A. Peniston, Ph.D., Librarian/Archivist, Newark Museum, Newark NJ.
[19] Henry C. Beck, “Builder of Birdville Who Slept Aloft in ‘Bird House’ Recalled in Domed ‘Monestary’ Near Toms River,” Camden Courier-Post, Thursday August 10, 1933, p. 8
[20] Several newspaper articles mention the Japanese Emperor as a collector of Greim’s birdhouses.
[21] Proceedings of the Grand Lodge […] for the State of New Jersey (Vol. XXVI — Part 2 ,Trenton NJ, 1915) p. 32
[22] Lizbeth L. Jackson, “Ober-Ammergau Again Awakening for the Production of Passion Play in the Year of 1910,” Philadelphia Inquirer, Sun. November 18, 1906, 1st. sec. p. 16.
[23] “Oberammergau Passion Play Actors Come to Sell Art Work,” The Honolulu Advertiser, January 13, 1924. P. 12
[24] Marguerite Moores Marshall, “ ‘Love One Another’ is Xmas Message Anton Lang Gives,” The Muncie Star, December 23, 1923.
[25] Anton Lang, Reminiscences, Carl Aug. Seyfried & Comp., Munich. 1930. p. 141 (Atlantic City NJ is approximately 42 miles from Toms River.)
[26] Henry C. Beck, “Builder of Birdville Who Slept Aloft in ‘Bird House’ Recalled in Domed ‘Monestary’ Near Toms River,” Camden Courier-Post, Thursday August 10, 1933, p. 8
[27] “Big New Shop at Birdville,” New Jersey Courier, Oct. 10, 1916 p. 1.
[28] “The ‘Bird House King’ Builds,” Chillicothe Gazette, May 15 1926 (page unknown).
[29] “Ocean County Group Visits Many Points of Interest,” Ocean County Sun, May 19, 1933 (page unknown).
[30] Henry C. Beck, “Builder of Birdville Who Slept Aloft in ‘Bird House’ Recalled in Domed ‘Monestary’ Near Toms River,” Camden Courier-Post, Thursday August 10, 1933, p. 8
[31] “Birdville Flutters Into Oblivion in South Toms River, “ Asbury Park Press, Sun. March 4, 1979, p. G6 10
[32] Ibid.
[33] David Patrick Kelly. “Outsider Architecture and Historic Preservation.” Athens, Georgia, 2001. https://getd.libs.uga.edu/pdfs/kelly_david_p_200112_mhp.pdf
