Rosslyn’s church atop a gas station is losing its halo, if you’ll permit a tortured metaphor about a demolition permit.

Arlington County has issued a permit for the site developer to tear down the decrepit old pedestrian skywalk that connected the church and other buildings in Rosslyn to the Metro across Fort Myer Drive, according to Katie O’Brien, a spokesperson for the Arlington County Department of Environmental Services.

It’s a step toward a larger redevelopment plan for the site, which will eventually require tearing down — and then rebuilding — one of the odder architectural juxtapositions in the region. O’Brien told me the county is hoping the full demolition of the church and gas station will happen this summer, pending a few more easements needed to move ahead.

So that means you and I have a few more months to properly say goodbye to the Arlington Temple United Methodist Church and the Sunoco gas station that sits directly under it.

The quirky community landmark has stood in Rosslyn for decades. The church and gas station were built in 1971, meaning they’ve weathered decades of transformation in Rosslyn. The iconic odd couple were just in time to watch Washington Post reporter Bob Woodward meet his “Deep Throat” Watergate scandal source in 1972 and 1973 in a parking garage just up the street. Metro service arrived in the neighborhood in 1977 with the opening of the Blue Line; the Orange Line opened the following year. The high-rises that began sprouting in the 60s and 70s got taller, and taller still.

A church on top of a gas station. One steeple and four gas pumps. A one-stop shop for all your fueling needs, spiritual and otherwise. Call it a counterpoint to the Arlington that likes to congratulate itself on being a shining example of smart growth (the smartest, straight-A-student, bureaucratic-data-driven-dream growth). Call it a bulwark against the grinding high-rise office monotony of Rosslyn (a far cry from the neighborhood’s rowdy roots).

Before we get carried away on a tide of sentiment, here’s the good news: the church and the gas station are included in the new plan for the site on Fort Myer Drive, approved by the County Board in 2021. The location will soon be home to twin high-rise buildings featuring office space, a hotel, 740 apartments, ground-floor retail, a public plaza, 24 committed affordable housing units, and … a church and a gas station.

God is bountiful, and, in Rosslyn, so is mixed-use development.

Snell Properties, the developer behind the Ames Center project, describes the plan as a “vibrant mixed-use development” including “a brand-new church and gas station.” It aligns with the county’s vision for Rosslyn as “a more walkable, dynamic, live-work-shop-play urban center and vibrant gateway to Arlington.” Amid all of the vibrancy, it’s right there in the plans presented to the County Board: a new 16,633-square-foot church on the ground floor of one of the high rises (no steeple this time, except for the floors rising above it to the heavens), and right next to it, a modest beige square marked “gas station” (7,855 square feet).

If you’ve gotten this far in this story, you might have some questions, including: why is there a gas station under a church? Why are they rebuilding the church-gas combo for the second time? Why does this DCist/WAMU reporter get to spend so many words poking fun at Rosslyn, an innocent neighborhood that somehow personally offends D.C. residents by its very existence?

To start with the history, the church plus gas station model came about as the result of a deal between a local businessman, William Ames, and James Robertson, Arlington Temple UMC’s founding pastor. Ames donated the land to the church — with the gas station sitting on it — in memory of his father, with the condition the church would rent its ground floor to the gas station, per The Washington Post.

That provided the church with a hefty amount of money towards its property tax bills, which only got bigger as land in Rosslyn got more expensive, per The Post.

As for the decision to replicate the church-gas arrangement in the new, Rosslyn-ified development, my inquiries to Snell Properties have so far gone unanswered. The Arlington Temple UMC congregation has temporarily relocated to a different building in North Arlington, according to Rev. Marti Ringenbach, the current pastor.

“We look forward to our new home in the future, but for now, we will bloom and serve where God has planted us,” she wrote in an email.

That brings us to the third question, and the answer is: I live here, and I’m fond of the places that make Arlington weird. I used to take the skywalk to leave the Metro station, and I’d pass right by the sanctuary doors — until, of course, the skywalk became unsafe. I have to confess, though, that I’ve never gotten gas down below; until recently, I was car-free, something that’s very easy to be in Rosslyn.

Nowadays, on my way home, my eyes slide past the forest of slick grey-and-glass high-rise office buildings and the hunks of concrete and rebar that were formerly office buildings — and alight on the church and the gas station, standing sentinel over the cars whizzing by on Fort Myer Drive. I put my thoughts about work or life aside and idly consider, for the millionth time, whether you could catch a faint whiff of gas from inside the sanctuary. Then I cross the street and keep walking up the hill. Progress beckons.