Masonic Clutter
And businesslike buildings
The other day I was looking around our Lodge’s big dining room. It’s a beautiful room.
But, there are probably a dozen coffee makers in it, from home style, to restaurant style, to the kind used by caterers. Most of them that last sort. They get used for the rare great big Masonic event, and in the past they were used when the Lodge would have a fundraiser at highway rest stops.
There are two pianos. An upright and a grand. Neither have been played for years.
There are decorations. Ugly damn things, my wife refers to their style as “Early Funeral Home.”
These things all caught my eye.
I wandered upstairs to our Lodge’s small dining room. It’s got lots of snapshots now. Snapshots of recent Lodge events, hanging on the walls. It’s also got a couple pieces of furniture that just don’t belong. A bedroom dresser used for storage. An old broken cabinet.
These things caught my eye.
Walking through a hallway, I entered our Lodge Room. Well, it’s beautiful, but it’s undone. Years ago we redid the hardwood floor. We never got around to redoing the risers in the South, West, and East. Speaking of the East, there’s a lot of junk there. Not junk really, stuff we use in our meetings, and stuff our Appendant and Concordant bodies use in their meetings. But to the unmasonic eye? Yeah, to that eye it’s just a bunch of junk.
These things caught my eye too.
Clutter. Our building is overflowing with Masonic clutter.
My daughter and future son-in-law want to go out for a drink. We go a block from my house to the massive and beautiful old Elks Lodge. The Elks couldn’t afford to keep their building. They sold it to a private person who has turned that beautiful old structure into tremendous profit center with eating and drinking down below, and an event center on the upper floors.
I can’t help but notice that.
I drive to a small town, not too far from where I live. It used to have a Masonic Lodge, but now the nearest Lodge is too far for any of the Masons who live there to want to travel to regularly. The Lodge was lost because it could no longer afford its building, and killed itself trying to do so. It was sold to a private person who turned it into a successful event center.
I can’t help but notice that.
I drive further from my little city, but not too awfully far, to a mid-sized city. It had a truly spectacular Masonic Temple years ago. But the Lodges that met inside that Temple just couldn’t afford it. So they sold it to private owners. It is now a wildly successful and truly spectacular event center. Right in the heart of the city.
I can’t help but notice that too.
Here’s the thing.
Our Masonic Temples, due to their very nature, are superb event centers.
But in my Jurisdiction at least, only a tiny handful of Lodges have managed to make their buildings into profitable event centers. A tiny handful have, the vast majority have found dismal results.
And this isn’t just a Masonic thing. We see it with the Elks, Eagles, Moose, and all the rest.
Fraternal groups generally fail in endeavors to profit from non-fraternal events. Weddings and the like. But then private owners buy those exact same buildings and find great success doing what the fraternal group was unable to do.
Why is that?
Might I suggest that one big reason is all the junk?
That maybe if we throw away all those coffee makers that are sitting around, give away all those pianos that no one plays, trash the decorations left over from a District Meeting ten years ago, pull the Masonic snapshots off the walls, finish unfinished beautification projects, and put the fraternal trappings into a closet, maybe then our spaces wouldn’t look as if they were filled with junk.
And maybe they would look better to people who might want to rent our building for their wedding, anniversary, or whatever.
But right now, most of our buildings are still filled with the clutter that accumulated over a century’s time.
When I see these successful event centers in our old Masonic Temples, it is easy to see that the buildings themselves never changed much when they moved from fraternal to private ownership. But the stuff inside of them went away. It was no longer visible, so the bride to be didn’t have to worry that there’d be some old Fez showing up in all of her wedding pictures.
We like this stuff. Hell, I love this stuff. We need to keep our important Masonic treasures, indeed we need to preserve them.
But there is a difference between what is a Masonic treasure and what is junk. Those old coffee makers aren’t Masonic treasures that need to be saved.
And there is a difference between keeping and preserving our Masonic treasures, and having them laying around in our dining hall where they look like nothing but junk to potential renters.
My Lodge is lucky. It’s Temple contains significant commercial space that helps to support the building. But for many Temple’s, outside event rentals are the absolute key to being able to properly fund ongoing maintenance and restoration of the building. They are the one solid method that we can use to preserve our important Masonic buildings.
But for it to work, they have to be cleaned up. And that means getting rid of the junk.
Good piece. We love the stuff and the clutter dont we, so we stop seeing it the way a bride or an event planner would.
I often wonder if the reason most of us never convert our spaces into event centers is that our heart isn't in it. It feels like a business, or a job, or something we're only doing to survive. I used to see the wedding venue as the obvious play too. Then a conversation with a local 4-H leader changed my mind. She told me her clubs were struggling to find places to meet for classes, and when they did find a spot, the place wanted market rate. So we fixed that. We host 4-H summer camp now, and we've got a Girl Scout sleepover coming up to help a visiting troop save on hotel money.
That got me thinking about the building as a community hub instead of a banquet hall. If we sent a hundred letters to every club and public group in town offering them space, our building starts to become their building too.
There's a practical side to it. A lot of our temples qualify as historic places, which opens up grants and exemptions we leave on the table. Our own board reincorporated as a 501(c)(3), and as a public charity instead of just a title holder, we can run programs, apply for grants, and offer space to other nonprofits. We serve a public good, and in our state that earns the property tax exemption. The community hub is where the charity status and the grants finally make sense, in a way that chasing weddings never quite did for most of us.
None of which kills the event center idea, if a lodge truly wants it. Two things just have to be honest about it. One is capital. A private buyer walks in ready to invest, while a lodge is usually keeping the lights on with nothing left for marketing. The other is skin in the game. When the place runs as a business, somebody's livelihood depends on filling that calendar, and a volunteer committee that meets once a month can't match that. So if nobody's paid to care, pay somebody. Lease the space to an operator at a flat rate and let them keep the upside. Tie a manager's pay to bookings. One temple in my district sold their building to a brother and his wife, but part of the deal was a 30-year lease back to the Masons at a fair price. The brothers kept their home, somebody with skin in the game runs the place, and it actually gets used.
Yes, and: Those buildings now making money that were not doing so under faternal management have a couple other things that they didn't used to.
1) The capital needed to fix up the building's problems. Every Lodge I've been in has had maintenence issues outstanding. Things that NEED fixed. A bussiness man can take out a loan to fix the building, we can't or won't.
2) Professional management. That means an advertising budget, a manager available during bussiness hours that can talk to you and sign a contract, usually an event coordinator who can assist with decoration and design... and all the other trappings of a bussiness. Does your lodge (and I speek to all Masons reading this) have an advertising budget? Does it have someone who is readily available during bussiness hours that can sign the contract? Or is it a brother who is at work, and can meet up with you some time after work, then we can go to the temple board and ask permission....
3) No arduous rules. No "you can't have beer, wine, or alcohol on site, because a group of tee-totalers is offended by the idea of alcohol, so they made a rule that either you can't have booze at all, or you must have a professional licenced bartender to have it.
In short, they are, and run like a bussiness who is in the bussiness of making a proffit. Suprise, suprise, they do so.