Church of the Sacred Heart of Jesus
457 West 51st Street.
Hell’s Kitchen – a legendary name in New York City! It designates the West Side from about West 29th street all the way up to around West 59th – historically rough, industrial, with more than its share of crime and not at all well off. For decades now, attempts have failed to replace this ominous name with “Clinton” (derived from a local park). More successful – from the real estate agent’s perspective – have been recent encroachments by other neighborhoods. We hear, wonder of wonders, that Chelsea now extends as far north as West 34th street. And at the region’s Northern end, the neighborhood around St. Paul the Apostle now and then styles itself as the “Upper West Side.” Yet “Hell’s Kitchen“ survives and indeed that name is asserted with pride by local residents and businesses.
A stroll through the area helps to explain the recent confusion. Along with the Lower East Side/East Village and the far Upper West Side, this area of Manhattan has experienced the city’s most radical transformation of the last few decades. Everywhere luxury housing is expanding, A luxury high-rise is being built across the street from Covenant House. What were once gritty if not downright fearsome streets now have in places a strangely Italian flair – with outdoor cafes, wine bars and low-rise luxury condominium buildings sporting balconies.
In the midst of all this – the unsavory reputation of the past and the hothouse atmosphere of the gentrifying present – stands the parish of Sacred Heart. Numerous other parishes have a claim on part of this area – for example, Sts. Cyril and Methodius (formerly St Raphael) St. Michael, Holy Cross, St Malachi. But none of these is as closely identified with Hell’s Kitchen as the red brick structure on West 51st Street. Indeed, the identification has at times been too close – the parish protested a few years ago when images of its church were used in the promotion of a film featuring a not very complementary depiction of an imagined old, disreputable Hell’s kitchen.
It is, after all, unfair. Because even if Hell’s Kitchen always had the reputation of a tough neighborhood, that concept acquired a whole new meaning in the late 1960’s -1970’s! Before then, serious crime actually had a very limited presence in this area. Future Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, for example, who lived in the neighborhood of St Raphael parish, recalled many years later the absence of real trouble when he was growing up.
Sacred Heart, founded in 1876, originally served a congregation of middle class and upper working class folks – originally Germans, then Irish, later Italians. In this parish there was less separation of the various nationalities compared to parishes in other parts of the city. 1) The prominent firm of Napoleon LeBrun designed a huge new church, rapidly completed in 1884-85. It may be hard to believe, but in its time the church of Sacred Heart was esteemed as a masterpiece of ecclesiastical design – observers remarked on its “Venetian “ aspects. It was the first church in New york City to feature (early, nonfigurative) Tiffany stained glass. 1) Side by side with the church arose a parochial school with a huge population of students.
The course of the parish history was relatively uneventful. Various new parishes arose around Sacred Heart. As the far west of Hell’s Kitchen grew more exclusively commercial, these contracted (nearby St. Ambrose closed as a parish in the 1930’s). As money permitted, more lavish windows, statues and paintings were acquired – Victorian churches tended to remain a “work in progress.” The appearance of the sanctuary – originally similar to churches such as Transfiguration in Chinatown, grew more and more magnificent.3) At least in the early years the liturgical and musical life of this parish seems to have been much more sophisticated than the caricature we all have heard of the Irish – dominated church of yore.
The crisis came much later. In the 1960’s and 70’s rampant street crime swept the neighborhood. The traditional population moved out – although a significant percentage of the old-timers remained well into the 1970’s. Enrollment in the parochial school plummeted from a high of 3,353 in the 1920’s to 500 by 1977. 4) Nowadays that number would seem respectable.
And then there was the Council. For whatever reason, Sacred Heart became the site of the earliest – and most revolutionary – exercise of aggiornamento in a traditional parish of New York City. A radically revised sanctuary was dedicated as early as May 16, 1965 – when the Council was still in session. The results, as seen in photographs from that time, are horrifying. Paintings, statues, altars and stained glass windows were ruthlessly eliminated from the apse. Some kind of monochrome paint covered all. The new wooden altar was surmounted by a grotesquely inappropriate baldachin of plain beams – somewhat like the structures of that era that still stand over the tabernacles at Nativity and Epiphany parishes. Browne reports that the ushers personally helped in the renovation by taking sledgehammers to the old marble altars ”of the joy of their youth.” 5) The Stations of the Cross were demolished too.
Between crime and the Council (the progressive state and the progressive Church) traditional parish life at Sacred Heart was in crisis by the 1970’s. The new predominant ethnic group of this parish was “Hispanic” – by the mid 1970’s already almost half the remaining population of the parish. 6) As in so many other parishes in New York, it is they who have kept Sacred Heart in existence in the last 30 or so years. They are the ones who have fought to keep the Sacred Heart School open. It still remains so, despite an Archdiocesan decision for closure.
Today the visitor to Sacred Heart encounters an almost idyllic scene on West 51st Street. It all seems very quant, calm and even attractive – a kind of Brooklyn Heights in Hell’s Kitchen. Further down the street to the east, the former St. Clare ‘s Hospital, after closing in 2007 and lying derelict for years, is being converted to luxury apartments. Yet another symbol of Catholic bankruptcy – in a number of different respects.
The Romanesque style facade makes a magnificent impression amid the restrained scale of the buildings of this street. The key decorative element – also in the interior – are the extraordinary bands and arches of red brickwork and terra cotta, with white stone highlights, creating an endlessly fascinating feast for the eyes.
The interior is spacious for a Manhattan parish church. But one senses a distinct emptiness – much like the feeling conveyed by the church of St Anthony of Padua downtown. The damage wrought by the Council has left indelible scars. The visitor seeking windows, statues and other artwork accumulated in the long history of this parish will be disappointed. But there is more of the same elaborate terra cotta, rows of decorative cherubs’ heads below the windows and a organ with gaily painted pipes just as in Victorian days.
Yet obviously efforts have been made to heal some of the wounds. While retaining the general layout established by the “reformers’ of the 1960’s, an attempt has been made to re -Catholicize the sanctuary; the space age baldachin is gone and a more traditional –looking structure erected in its place. The entire interior seems to have undergone a lavish repainting in the not too distant past. Gaudy colors have replaced the monochrome look of the 1960’s. Is it authentic? I do not know – I would guess that some of the same “artists” were at work here who helped in the redecoration of St. Bernard’s on West 14th Street. But color is better than post- conciliar gray or beige!
Not all the changes of the more recent past have been for the better, however. Offices and a chapel have been built into the church nave. Institutional glass doors disfigure the façade. And much of the artwork is undistinguished.
(above) Figures at the “high altar.” (Below) A white marble “Irish” statue of the Sacred Heart gazes out through doors more appropriate to a commercial enterprise.
(above)Statues formerly in the sanctuary or on altars are now distributed around the church.
Sacred Heart still gamely struggles on. A visitor to noonday mass will find only a small congregation in side chapel. As usual, gentrification displaces the older – if poorer population – while the new inhabitants are not necessarily interested at all in a Catholic Church, which in turn makes little or no effort to evangelize them. And the fate of St. Clare’s hospital down the street shows what the property values in this neighborhood currently are. Will this “iconic” – to employ an overused term – parish succumb to the newfound, unimaginable prosperity after having struggled through so many recent decades of adversity?
The parish Website: http://www.shjnycparish.org. Sacred Heart parish is fortunate to have a fine parish history:
Browne, Henry. J.: One Stop above Hell’s Kitchen: Sacred Heart Parish in Clinton (Limited Edition Publishers 1977)
(Although I would not agree with many of the views of the author – a typical product of the progressive wing of the clergy in the 1960’s. Yet there is already in this book a tinge of regret at the destruction of the 1960’s)
1) Browne, Op. Cit. at 31.
2) Browne, Op. Cit. at 25.
3) Browne, Op. Cit. at 26-27.
4) Browne, Op. Cit. at 34.
5) Browne, Op. Cit. at 27.
6) Browne, Op. Cit. at 36.
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