Life and clutter inside the Evening Light Mission

As a kid, Charlie Kent used to walk past the building at 234 Mill St. almost every day on his way to Washington Elementary School. Back then it housed a church where his late uncle, Leon Kent, preached.

The building now is Charlie Kent's home and a warehouse for his antique store. The cavernous main room houses a collection of thousands of trinkets and unconventional collectibles the antique store owner has been accumulating since the 1970s.

Entering the main room from above and descending the stairs from the former altar is like being escorted into the hideout of Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves.

Mounted animal heads, a 20-foot folding ladder he had to saw off to get under the soaring ceiling, a Buddha, ancient microscopes, a Ford Futura grill and steering wheel, a playable upright piano, birdhouses, a can opener made for a Goliath, soft couches and chairs arranged in conversation pits, an airborne antique bathtub and more and more and more are all illuminated in the evening mainly by candlelight. The eye has difficulty taking it all in.

"It's like a big collage," says Kent, a former theatrical set designer.

Indeed, the jaw-dropping effect comes not so much from the things in Kent's collage as the way he has arranged them with an eye toward playfulness and comfort.

His favorite things

He employs umbrellas as shades for the lights that hang from the ceiling.

A collection of paintings bought at the Salvation Army are among his favorite things. "They're horrible," he says, but points out a charm to be found in each one.

Kent, who owns the Broadway antique store Curious Goods, bought the church building in 1998 from the Freemasons. The roof had a huge hole, the ceiling in the main room was covered with white acoustical tile. The hole and tile are gone, replaced by a phantasmagoria of strange objects and flickering lights.

He planned to do something more traditional with archways.

"This is not what I intended at all," he says. "This is what evolved. It's all pretty much junk I've hauled in."

One prize is a stained glass window that may have come from the church the Cape Girardeau Police Department once occupied at the corner of Independence and Sprigg streets, where the the city's fire deparment is now located.

He calls his home the Evening Light Mission after one of the churches that once occupied the building. There is no sacrilege in living in a former church, he says. "A church is not the building. A church is in here," he says, motioning to his heart.

Kent cannot think of anything bad about living in a church. "What would be a better place?" he asks.

His apartment upstairs is more of the same. Kent keeps things at the Evening Light Mission before they graduate to his antique store. Some things never graduate. "I've always been a pack rat," he says.

Place for parties

But he prefers to think of the main room as a studio space. It's also a good location for a party because Kent has provided thousands of things to talk about.

A wedding, his sister's and niece's graduation parties and many holiday parties have been held here. People who attended his last Halloween party, complete with fortune teller, still talk about it. The leftover fake cobwebs don't look out of place.

Saturday he's hosting a house concert. Before this week's primary, the four Cape Girardeau mayoral candidates were welcomed for a forum sponsored by the Downtown Neighborhood Association. Those who attended were greeted outside by four snowmen with the appropriate nametags: Jay, Mel, Stan and Walt.

Little on the exterior of the building indicates its past. The neon cross he remembers from long ago disappeared.

The building housed a flea market at one time, Kent recalls. "I've seen a lot of things go through here."

His sister lives behind him in a house that might have been the parsonage. "Everything in this neighborhood has some draw to me," he says.

Eventually he hopes to open an antique store in the church building. He is renovating a regular house nearby to live in someday.

"That is the dream. This is the nightmare," he jokes.

sblackwell@semissourian.com

335-6611, extension 182