New Floors, Nostalgic Memories

A big thanks to all of the Covenant Partners who helped to renovate our Lee Fellowship Hall’s floors in spring of 2024 through the Heart of the City Foundation! These floors greatly needed an upgrade. Now the floors are easy to clean, smell fresh, and evoke memories of special times for all. Together, we are truly the heart of the city, sustaining and extending the reach of our church.

In Lee Fellowship Hall, the deep blue carpeted floors had become time-consuming and arduous to clean, and it was nearly impossible to get all of the lively lunchtime odors uprooted from the fibers. Motivated to ease the burden on the custodial staff, our church hoped to renovate these floors. In spring of 2024, Covenant Partners like you, through the Heart of the City Foundation, helped install luxury vinyl tiles with a beautiful wood grain look. Now we get to fellowship in a gorgeous, fresh-smelling space, and the custodial staff are able to easily clean up any dirt, crumbs, and spills. 

After many, many years of use and enjoyment, the carpeted flooring in Lee Fellowship Hall had become troublesome. Naturally, with all of the events held there, and with the daily lunches for the children of The Christ School, dirt and food consistently was ground into the flooring. With spirit, the custodial staff continued innovating new ways to try and remove the grime. But over time, there was no getting around it—the floors deserved a refresh.

Thanks to the generosity of Covenant Partners like you, our church family at First Pres has been enjoying these new floors in Lee Fellowship Hall for almost two years now! We had the pleasure of hosting our annual Scholarship Reception in the hall this past spring.

As you likely know, the Heart of the City Foundation exists to sustain and extend the reach of our church, and one way Covenant Partners like you do this through the Foundation is by maintaining our campus. When it was finally decided that the floors would be renovated, the generosity of people like you helped make it happen. 

We ripped up the old floors, revealing the original hardwood floors. To match the other buildings on campus, we installed light-colored luxury vinyl tiles that resemble wood, and which are waterproof and so easy to clean. 

Charles Bell, First Pres’s COO and Heart of the City Foundation trustee, says, “It’s really pretty. It’s lighter. The carpet that was in there before was kind of a dark blue with some black in it. It made the hall look a lot bigger and a lot brighter, and that actually surprised us because the whole goal was really just to make it easier to clean and maintain, and it ended up making it a lot more aesthetically appealing.” 

For some of the oldest Covenant Partners in our congregation, like Jim Stowers, these new floors were more than refreshing—they were nostalgic. With the wood grain and light color, the floors are reminiscent of the original flooring, which flooded them with precious memories of when the Lee Fellowship Hall first opened in spring of 1962. 

In 1962, Jim and Diane Stowers were newlyweds, recently returned to Orlando from Gainesville where Jim had just graduated from the University of Florida. They remember when the Lee Fellowship Hall was built, then simply called the Fellowship Hall. Jim notes, “They added the ‘Lee’ later after two elders that were longtime members of the church—one of them was Donald Lee and his brother was T.G. Lee of the dairy—and they were both very active and that’s where the ‘Lee’ came in.” 

Roller skating was all the craze in 1962! All the more reason for First Pres to host roller skating parties in Lee Fellowship Hall in the ‘60s.

When the hall opened, the congregation was delighted by the space, especially by the “magnificent,” as Jim would say, hardwood floors, like the floors you would find on a basketball court or bowling alley. At the time, roller skating was super popular, especially with children and young adults, and it wasn’t long before the church was hosting open skate nights. They would scoot all of the chairs to the outside wall, strap on their skates, and roll. 

There was one caveat: you had to have wooden roller skates. Jim explains, “Well, most kids had metal roller skates and you could of course skate on the sidewalks or streets with the metal ones. So a lot of us had metal roller sakes, especially when we were growing up, but they wouldn’t allow those in Lee Fellowship Hall because they would tear up the floors.” 

Because wooden roller skates weren’t as common, the church got a bunch of them to check out to people. If you’re facing the stage in Lee Fellowship Hall and you go off to the left down the hallway, the women’s bathroom on the left, that used to be the roller skate closet! Volunteers would show up a few times a month to participate in the fun, relinquishing the wooden roller skates into eager hands. “That took a lot of manpower,” Jim remembers, “But it was so popular and so unusual that they were able to do that, I’m guessing, five to eight years.” 

Photo from a 1966 edition of LIFE Magazine

The open skate nights were treasured by many, especially the children and newlyweds like Jim and Diane. For the youth ministry, it was not only fun, it was an outreach opportunity. The youth ministry would reserve the skate rink, on perhaps a Tuesday night, and the kids would come. Jim says, “That was one of the youth activities that brought in kids that didn’t go to our church. And some of those kids and their families joined the church because of it.”

Eventually, the church chose to retire the skate nights because of how expensive it was to refinish the floor every year, but the joy of those skate nights lives on in all who had the pleasure of experiencing them. And the new Lee Fellowship Hall flooring reminds them of those wonderful days. “This flooring is really, really nice. It’s too bad we can’t roller skate on it!” Jim says cheekily. 

Thank you for carrying on the legacy so many Covenant Partners have left behind for us in our Lee Fellowship Hall by renovating these floors. Undoubtedly, the custodial staff are grateful. But even more than that, future generations will get to make their own special memories in this splendid space of worship and fellowship!

A Gemini 3 AI rendition of a 1960s skate night in Lee Fellowship Hall