The Metropolitan Community Church of San Francisco held services at 150 Eureka Street in the Castro for 26 years — losing 500+ members to AIDS — before selling the building in 2015. It was demolished in 2023. A new podcast recovered more than 1,200 cassette tapes from beneath the floorboards.

When the Metropolitan Community Church of San Francisco sold 150 Eureka Street in the Castro in 2015 — the former Pentecostal building it had occupied since 1980, purchased for $250,000, where an entire generation of queer Christians buried their dead through the AIDS epidemic — the cassette tapes stayed behind. More than 1,200 of them, tucked beneath the floor of the sound room, recordings of services held between 1987 and 2003. By 2023, the building was gone, demolished to make way for four condominiums that averaged $2.16 million each.

The tapes survived.

Three hundred twenty-five of those cassettes have been digitized and now form the spine of When We All Get to Heaven, a 10-episode audio documentary produced by Eureka Street Productions and distributed by Slate. KQED's The Bay podcast spotlighted it this week — it's Pride Month, and the series makes a specific argument about what that Castro address held during the worst years of the epidemic.

MCC-SF is one of the oldest gay-affirming Christian congregations in the country. The first San Francisco service was held February 22, 1970, at Jackson's Bar & Grill on Powell Street in North Beach — two years after Rev. Troy Perry founded the national Metropolitan Community Church movement out of his Los Angeles living room. The congregation bought 150 Eureka in 1980. By 1988, roughly two-thirds of the male membership were HIV-antibody-positive, and about 30 congregants had AIDS. It was not uncommon, at the peak, for the church to hold three or four funerals on each day of the weekend. Over 25 years, MCC-SF lost more than 500 members.

The podcast — hosted by Lynne Gerber, an independent scholar who has spent years researching religious responses to HIV/AIDS in San Francisco — uses those tapes to reconstruct what it meant to sustain faith inside a community absorbing mass death. The series surfaces a specific tension MCC-SF occupied: caught, as KQED describes it, between "a religious world that said gays had no place, and a gay rights movement that said God had no place."

MCC-SF now holds Sunday services at St. Mary's Chapel inside Trinity-St. Peter's Episcopal Church at 1620 Gough Street in Lower Pacific Heights — a borrowed space, not a building it owns. The institutional archive, roughly 10 cubic feet of records spanning 1978 to 2014, is held at the San Francisco Public Library's James C. Hormel LGBTQIA Center.

At 150 Eureka, four condominiums stand where the sound room was.