On the evening of March 9, neighbors across the street from Twin Steeples Creative Arts Center heard a boom loud enough to shake their house. Their dog nearly jumped out of its skin. They ran outside expecting to find their own home on fire. Instead they saw smoke pouring from the steeple of the 125-year-old former Lutheran church at 220 East Oak Street, the taller of the two former churches that make up Ponchatoula's arts center. Lightning had struck the spire and the fire was already working its way through the attic.
If you live in Ponchatoula, you already know Twin Steeples. It is the building everyone points to when out-of-town guests ask what there is to do downtown: two former churches, one Lutheran and one from a different congregation, physically rotated in 2021 to face each other across a courtyard, so the building itself doubles as the reason to visit. What you might not know, unless you were following it closely over the summer, is that the fire never actually closed the organization. It closed one building. The two are not the same thing, and the difference tells you something real about how this town's cultural life actually works.
What burned, and what didn't
Ponchatoula Fire Chief Stormy Joiner later said lightning strikes on the steeple weren't unheard of, and that the fire crews usually manage to keep the damage contained to the attic. Seven trucks and around sixteen firefighters, many of them volunteers, got there fast enough to do exactly that. No one was hurt. The building was closed for the evening, as it normally is on Mondays, so the bigger concern was the art.
Firefighters went in, moved every piece on display out of the building, and handed them off to nearly two dozen residents who showed up to help once word got around. The antique stained glass, one of the building's defining features, survived. The steeple did not. According to reporting from WWL-TV, the fire marshal determined the new steeple couldn't be rebuilt to its original height. The organization opened a fundraiser with an initial goal of $7,500 to cover what insurance wouldn't, and later filed a state funding request for $50,000 to complete a full restoration of the building.
The months in between
Here's the part that's easy to miss if you only heard about the fire and never checked back in. Twin Steeples didn't go quiet while the building sat closed. The organization kept running its calendar, it just moved the calendar somewhere else.
In July, the center hosted its third annual art camp in partnership with NOCCA, the New Orleans Center for Creative Arts. It ran a six-week Tiny Worlds Community Art Project that brought people of different ages together to build and create side by side. It donated its space so a local instructor could offer a scholarship-funded free art camp. Twin Steeples has also kept up its recurring night market partnership with Vintage 985, the vintage and consignment shop on East Pine Street, with vendor booths set up both at the arts center's courtyard and outside Vintage 985's storefront a few blocks away.
Leyla Hekmatdoost, the center's executive director, put it plainly in the days after the fire: people need more than work, school, and going home to watch television. They need a place to build connections with each other. That's the actual product Twin Steeples sells, and a burned steeple can't take it off the shelf.
The steeple came back before the building did
By August, the physical rebuild started to show. On August 13, crews installed a new steeple on top of the damaged building, a visible marker that the restoration had moved from planning into construction. WBRZ reported that the center said a tentative reopening date would be announced soon, but as of this writing that date hasn't been set. Nearly six months after the fire, the building most associated with Ponchatoula's arts scene still doesn't have a firm reopening day, and the organization's programming has continued anyway.
That's worth sitting with for a second. The building people think of as Ponchatoula's cultural anchor has been offline since March, and if you weren't already a regular at Twin Steeples events, there's a decent chance you didn't notice. That's not a knock on the building. It's a sign that the town's cultural infrastructure doesn't actually depend on any single address.
What the rest of downtown has going on this fall
While the steeple was down, the rest of the calendar kept filling in around it.
| When | What | Where |
|---|---|---|
| Sept 19, 2026 | Krewe of Erin Celtic Heritage Festival | Ponchatoula Country Market |
| Oct 23-24, 2026 | Toula 'Que and Fall Fest | Downtown Ponchatoula, Halloween weekend |
| TBD | Twin Steeples reopening | 220 East Oak Street |
The Krewe of Erin's Celtic Heritage Festival brings Celtic and local vendors, regional bands, and Irish dancing to the Country Market grounds, free to attend. A month later, the Strawberry Festival organization runs Toula 'Que and Fall Fest over Halloween weekend, with a barbecue cook-off, amusement rides, and a holey board tournament that's become something of a running joke among regulars who take it far more seriously than the name suggests.
None of that calendar depends on Twin Steeples reopening on any particular timeline. It happens on its own schedule, in its own spaces, because downtown Ponchatoula was never built around one venue in the first place.
Two blocks over, nothing slowed down
Walk down Pine Street or Railroad Avenue this month and the antique district that gives Ponchatoula its "America's Antique City" reputation is doing exactly what it's done for years: historic early-1900s storefronts, most of them family-run, stacked with everything from Victorian glassware to country furniture. C.J.'s Antiques and Collectibles on Railroad Avenue and Ponchatoula Antiques a few doors down are two of the anchors locals point newcomers toward, and Vintage 985 on East Pine Street, the same shop that partnered with Twin Steeples for its night markets, has become one of the newer additions to that strip, mixing vintage consignment with local art.
The dining scene has kept moving too. The District, a new American restaurant at 100 West Pine Street with a patio that looks out on downtown, has become a regular mention alongside longer-running spots like Nola Mia, Millside Restaurant and Bar, and Paul's Cafe on local review sites. None of that growth waited on a steeple to go back up.
What the fire actually taught this town
It's tempting to write the Twin Steeples story as a recovery narrative: building burns, community rallies, steeple returns. That's true as far as it goes, but it undersells what actually happened. A closure stretching toward six months at the town's most photographed building barely registered outside the people directly involved, because the organization's programming, the antique district's foot traffic, and the fall festival calendar all run on separate tracks. Ponchatoula's cultural identity isn't concentrated in one address. It's spread across a nonprofit that relocates its own events, a strip of antique shops that don't need a headline venue to draw people downtown, and a festival calendar set by community groups that have been running these events for years regardless of what else is happening on East Oak Street.
That's a different kind of resilience than the one usually described in stories like this. It's not that Ponchatoula bounced back from a setback. It's that the setback never touched the parts of downtown that actually keep people coming back on an ordinary Saturday.
If you're already living here, keep an eye on Twin Steeples' own channels for the reopening date. It'll be worth showing up for, steeple and all. And if you're the kind of person who likes knowing what's actually happening in a place before you make any decisions about it, that's really what Amanda Stevens Property Group does for the Northshore day in and day out. Reach out anytime to request a free market consultation, whether you're thinking about a move now or just keeping tabs on the town you already call home.
