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ST. LOUIS — Dave Blum has been here before. He’s inside the sanctuary of a hollowed-out church, surrounded by rubble. The roof that should be over his head is under his feet.

The planks burned to a crisp more than three months ago in a fire that destroyed Sk8 Liborius, the passion project he dreamed up more than a decade ago.

“If we can save the building, we’re going to try,� Blum said on a recent Sunday.

It’s almost exactly what he was thinking in 2011 when he was handed the St. Liborius property from the Karen House, a Catholic homeless shelter that had been using the rectory. The shelter could no longer manage the upkeep of the 19th century Gothic Revival cathedral, once an anchor of the ÃÛÑ¿´«Ã½ Place neighborhood in North City.

Back then, the roof leaked so much that lakes formed when it rained. The walls were moldy. Windows were broken. Floors rotted out. Anything valuable had long ago been stripped away.

Blum fixated on the one thing he could still see inside the soaring columns, the abandoned bell tower, the crumbling masonry: possibility.

Even the four-alarm blaze that consumed the skate park in June couldn’t destroy it.

“The project’s different now, but it’s not dead,� Blum said. “In a way, we kind of have a blank slate again.�

Blum maintains that Sk8 Liborius will be revived, but the timeline — and the look of it — is unclear. Ideas are rolling in. More will be solicited at a college workshop next month. Fundraising will be crucial. And pie-in-the-sky plans may have to be brought down to earth.

In the meantime, Sk8 Liborius’ followers are biding their time, forced to seek their thrills elsewhere as they await another reincarnation of the space.

“When they rebuild it, I know it’s going to be cool,� said 17-year-old Ava Verhoff of Overland. “Whatever they build is going to be cool.�

The roller skater first tagged along to Sk8 Liborius with her dad one day about four years ago. She was soon a regular.

Now Ava mostly skates at Ramp Riders in the Benton Park neighborhood. She likes it, but it’s not quite the same as the sanctuary.

“It had an energy about it,� she said. “It was my favorite place to go.�

Slow growth

Years of grunt work preceded the advent of Sk8 Liborius’ ramps, rails and half-pipes. Ten dumpsters were filled with the refuse that had piled up while the church, closed by the archdiocese in 1992, sat empty. Bit by bit, funded by underground raves and punk shows, volunteers restored the walls, roof and flooring.

Avian Duke, 23, a machinist at a tool and die shop, started on the crew as a teenager. He learned tuckpointing and fixed whatever needed fixing; the rest of the time, he was on his skateboard.

“There definitely wasn’t much stuff there at first,� said Duke, who lives in Alton. “We just kept adding more.�

The centerpiece was a 12-by-40-foot wooden vert ramp, which has a flat bottom and a vertical section at the top. It was the biggest in the Midwest, “like a canyon,� said Bryan Bedwell, who builds skate parks across the country and joined forces with Blum about nine years ago.

As more people heard about Sk8 Liborius, more people helped. More people helped, and more people heard about it. Companies like Skatelite and Converse sponsored the floor resurfacing and a “street course� with rails and grinds.

After years of operating under the radar, Sk8 Liborius became the subject of news stories and documentaries. Its nonprofit, focused on youth outreach, kick-started fundraising efforts, with a of making it accessible to the public.

Bedwell had applied for construction permits two weeks before the fire. He was there with friends and his toddler son on the Wednesday night in late June when an electrical spark ignited the rectory, jumped across the buildings and torched the roof of the church.

“It was just a tinderbox inside those walls,� Bedwell said.

Next steps

Everyone got out safely. Bedwell and his friends knocked on neighbors’ doors to alert them, but firefighters were able to keep the blaze contained. The next morning, smoke still hanging in the air, a few hundred people showed up to shovel debris and take stock of the losses.

“There’s so many people across the world pulling for us,� said Bedwell. “It’s a huge motivator. There’s going to be a skate park one way or another.�

The walls of the church are still standing. Architects and assessors are determining whether it makes more sense to keep them up or tear them down. Next month, a design workshop with students from Washington University and Ranken Technical College will be held to solicit ideas. Some eager artists have already submitted renderings. Blum and Bedwell are seeking feedback from Hogan Street residents and Liborius regulars.

Blum boils it down to three options: rip everything out and build an open-air, concrete skate park; rebuild the roof and replicate the original plan; or, alternative No. 3, “anything in between,� he said.

Bedwell estimates a five-year timeline “if everything goes exactly to plan.�

That means five more years that Jordan Anderson of south ÃÛÑ¿´«Ã½ will be frequenting his other skating haunts: the flood wall along the Mississippi River, Peter Mathews Memorial Skate Park in the Bevo Mill neighborhood, parking lots, bridges and “other DIY setups.â€�

Anderson, 32, has been skating since middle school. He found his home at Sk8 Liborius when it was still in its infancy.

“It’s crazy how people come together from this damn building,� said Anderson, who met his girlfriend there. “There’s still potential here. There’s no right or wrong way to do this, as long as it feels good.�