Fire damage was visible Wednesday morning from the rear of the Elijah Missionary Baptist Church at 74 Second Ave. in Albany.

Standing on Second Avenue, you could be tricked into thinking the glorious church was as sturdy as ever, if you ignored the lingering stench of burnt wood.

But the rear of the former Our Lady Help of Christians, built in 1880, is where the building's ruination became clear, with its nave exposed to the sky, its roof melted and twisted, its songbooks lying in piles of wood and brick, its altar eradicated.

On Wednesday morning, the damage at 74 Second Ave. was obviously fatal. There could be no coming back from this.

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Still, you could see how beautiful the church had been before fire ripped through late last Thursday, rousing Bishop Avery Comithier from sleep. The blaze caused by a space heater burned for nearly four hours, devouring a grand building that once was the centerpiece of life in its section of the old South End.

The church was built for the city's German Catholic population at a time when nearly every nationality in the city had a congregation (or two or three or four) to call its own.

"It wasn't good enough to have only a Catholic Church," said Jack McEneny, a city historian and former assemblyman. "You had to have a German........

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