Keeping religious aesthetic was no oversight
By Cole Waterman
The Bay City Times
BAY CITY, Mich. (AP) — For 123 years, a hallowed building in Bay City’s South End was home to the congregation of Memorial Presbyterian Church.
Last month, a business inked with the name of a different religion moved in, according to The Bay City Times.
VooDoo Tattoo now occupies the former church. While the structure is no longer a place of worship, it still has its share of religious iconography. Resplendent stained glass windows depicting biblical scenes, flickering votive candles, portraits of the Madonna holding the baby Jesus, and statues of saints are still rife throughout the structure.
Keeping the religious aesthetic and mixing it with contemporary secular art was no oversight.
“Our (previous) shop already had all of this in it,” said shop owner Justin Rodriguez. “Being ‘VooDoo,’ there’s a lot of correlation with Catholicism, so a lot of this was already our stuff, so it transitioned right in here.”
Rodriguez purchased the building on May 13 for $35,000, according to the Bay County Register of Deeds. It relocated from its previous site and opened for business Sept. 28.
“We kind of stumbled upon it,” Rodriguez said. “We were looking for a few things and we saw that this was for sale so we immediately checked into it. We’ve always been interested in religious history, religious art and history in general. The building is beautiful. The possibilities when I saw it seemed endless.”
The church held its last service on Jan. 11 at a time when only 32 members remained on record. It had been open for 123 years.
Between buying the building and opening it for business, Rodriguez had it drastically renovated. The walls are vividly painted in green, purple and orange, among other colors. The exterior is likewise now a striking shade of yellow. The original bell in the tower, which still works, has been unveiled, too. The pews were removed and in their place, partitions erected to form work stations for the six tattoo artists and one piercer who work there.
“It was a lot of fun and a lot of hard work,” Rodriguez said. “In the end, I was really happy with how it came out. We stripped everything out. There was carpet and subflooring; we stripped all of that down. We had the floors refinished. We put in tile.”
All told, the renovation costs exceeded $150,000, Rodriguez said.
One of the aspects Rodriguez retained from the building’s previous role was the pulpit, complete with an organ and altar.
Rodriguez said he has heard very few concerns from the more Leviticus-favoring faithful regarding a church being repurposed as a tattoo shop.
“I think people didn’t want us using it negatively,” he said. He went on to say that once people started seeing they were being reverential of the site, their misgivings were alleviated.
“It is a positive thing,” he said. “We put a lot of hard work into it. We really are respecting the place. We love this place.”
The business is open from 11 a.m. to 9 p.m. on Mondays through Wednesdays and from noon to 10 p.m. on Thursdays through Saturdays.
Since the move to the new location, Rodriguez said the artists have been staying busy.
“We had a lot of people who were waiting to get tattooed as we opened,” he said.
