The story of the Met reads as a series of heartbreaking and frustrating near-death experiences. When the gold-flecked auditorium wasn't being ravaged by fires and floods, it was being chipped away by neglect brought on by the decline of North Philadelphia in the '70s and '80s. After the Rev. Mark Hatcher picked it up for a mere $250,000 in 1996, Philadelphia building inspectors threatened to immediately tear it down. Hatcher, who had grown up attending an evangelical church at the Met, told me he had to max out his credit cards to pay for emergency repairs. He was able to do just enough work to keep the city's wrecking crew at bay. "People told me I was going out of my mind."