History
The structure was built from 1888 to 1889 for St. Paul's Presbyterian Church. It originally had a large steeple. Unfortunately the church was built on sand, and the steeple side started sinking into the ground. The steeple was therefore removed early in the 20th century, leaving the building as a relatively squat stone structure.
With the creation of the United Church of Canada in 1925, St. Paul's merged with the nearby Eastern Methodist Church and got its current name.
In the late part of the 20th century the church struggled. The growing secularization of Canadian society and the smaller number of people living downtown meant that the church was rarely more than half full and the Sunday school had only a handful of children.
Read more about this topic: St. Paul's Eastern United Church
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—Sidney Buchman (1902–1975)
“History is the present. That’s why every generation writes it anew. But what most people think of as history is its end product, myth.”
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