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Emily Dempsey, 89, has been a member of the Allen African Methodist Episcopal Church in Cape May, New Jersey, her entire life. Born in November 1936, she was baptized a few months later in the one-room church on Franklin Street.

She was there when it caught fire in 2018. Dempsey said that only quickened the inevitable demise of the 130-year-old church.

“The congregation was down to just a handful. It was very hard,” Dempsey said. “It was leaking all around the bell tower. The ceiling was dropping in. It was in bad shape.”

Dempsey said the regional AME conference, which owns the building, was not interested in reviving a dilapidated church for a dwindling congregation. It was sold to the city of Cape May for $350,000.

After $1.2 million in renovations, Cape May has handed over the keys to East Lynne Theater Company, which has been performing in Cape May for 45 years.

“I am elated,” Dempsey said at the ribbon cutting. “I’m loving every second of it. It’s just unbelievable that so many people worked so hard to bring this to fruition. It’s just amazing.”

The renovation brought back original features of the traditional 19th-century church, including rebuilding its steeple and retaining original stained-glass windows dedicated to former congregants. But now it will be a secular, black-box performance space called the Clemans Theater, after the late patron David Clemans.

A new chapter

East Lynne has been using Cape May Presbyterian Church to stage performances, which range from readings to music revues to fully staged plays. Last year, it staged a season of eight productions.

Susan Tischler, the theater company’s board president, said the former Allen AME Church will transform for the company.

“We had a lovely relationship with Cape May Presbyterian Church, but one of the downsides of it is that it is a church. We had to strike the set every Saturday night,” she said. “Therefore the sets had to be minimal every Saturday night. Therefore you could only have so many actors. Everything was just defined by the space that we were in. Now, this opens up to so many possibilities.”

The city of Cape May’s partnership with East Lynne allows the city to also utilize the building for its own purposes.

The former church is a crucial piece of a burgeoning cultural district the city has been developing for several years. Franklin Street School across the street was originally built as a segregated Black school. Last year, it opened as a new branch of the Cape May County Library System.

Around the corner is the preserved historic summer home of Stephen Smith, founder of the AME Church and coordinator of the Underground Railroad. The former Cape May church was likely used to harbor people fleeing enslavement in Delaware.

Up the street is the active Macedonia Baptist Church, established in 1895. In 2021, the city opened the Harriet Tubman Museum a couple blocks away.

If Allen AME Church could no longer act as a worship space, Mayor Zack Mullock said it still can act as a cultural site.

“There was some thought about tearing it down. Cape May needs a lot of parking. The thought was maybe we have some more municipal parking,” he said. “But I thought this church is so beautiful, but also the history — we started looking more into it.”

A long history of Black accomplishment

The AME Church was founded by Smith, a former slave who became, at one time, the richest Black man in the U.S.. For a brief time, from 1886–1887, it was led by Charles Albert Tindley as the first pastoral appointment for the itinerant preacher who became known for composing countless gospel songs, including the basis of the Civil Rights anthem “We Shall Overcome.” He later founded Tindley Temple on South Broad Street in Philadelphia.

Cape May is the birthplace of Jarena Lee, the first Black female preacher in the AME Church and the first Black woman to publish an autobiography in 1838.

“[The AME Church] could have sold it for a higher price to a developer. Which has happened, frankly. It happened right down the street,” Mullock said. “But it was important to them to make sure that this was still part of the community.”

The interior of the church has been divided by a wall that buffers the performance space from the front door and created a small lobby area. In that space will be a rotating exhibition of archival photography representing historic members of Cape May’s Black community.

As the oldest surviving congregant of the church, Dempsey said she is thrilled that the building will continue to be a place for the community to gather, albeit for theater instead of worship.

“We’re fortunate to have a mayor like Mayor Zack Mullock,” she said. “I’ve been here since 1936 and I’ve never seen this kind of work being done to uplift the Black community. I’m very proud of everybody that’s worked on this project.”

A small, unnamed side street adjacent to Cape May City Library on Franklin Street has been named after Dempsey on the occasion of the opening of the Clemans Theater.

Construction work on the former church is not over. There is no backstage area or any dressing rooms. What you see in the one-room church is exactly what you get, which makes it impossible for East Lynne Theater Company to stage plays featuring an ensemble of Actors’ Equity performers, whose union contract insists on a backstage area. East Lynn plans to build an addition off the back of the church to act as a backstage.

The theater company will continue to stage productions at Cape May Presbyterian Church and use the former AME church for smaller, one-person shows and cabaret. The first production at the Clemans Theater will be “Every Brilliant Thing,” a tear-jerking comedy with one performer, from July 31 to Aug. 30.