St. Joseph (in Yorkville)
404 East 87th Street
East 87th Street in New York on a bright afternoon in early summer. It all seems a subdued and almost idyllic corner of the city: trees, mothers with strollers, and relatively fewer high-rise apartments that usual. The modest stone façade of a church and its tower still stand out picturesquely among such human-scaled surroundings.it is St. Joseph in Yorkville, one of the last survivors of that former vast Central European neighborhood.
By the time of my parent’s generation the center of German-American activity in New York had shifted to East 86th Street. Except for Luchow’s restaurant, Kleindeutschland downtown had been forgotten. By the early 1980’s the German flavor of even this new center of Yorkville had almost disappeared. Only a few restaurants, food stores and churches still remained. By 2014 almost all of this in turn has vanished. Except for some churches, the traces of the Slovaks, Hungarians and Czechs had disappeared as well. The last decade has seen a great revival of German bars and restaurants in New York. Some of these are a recreation of the original almost eerie in their exactitude and detail. One can order today a “halver Hahn” from Cologne on Rivington Street or drink Andechs beer from a Bavarian monastery in “Alphabet City.” But none of this has anything to do anymore with Yorkville or German immigrant culture.
The Church of St. Joseph was founded in 1873 almost as a mission to the Germans who had begun settling in this neighborhood. An attraction for German Catholics in this area was the chapel of nearby German orphanage – also called St. Joseph’s – in the care of the Redemptorists. Architectural remnants of that chapel can still be found today. 1) St. Joseph’s parish, dedicated by Cardinal McCloskey in 1874, was one of the last in a splendid chain of German-American parishes that once dotted Manhattan: Most Holy Redeemer, St. Nicholas, St. John the Baptist, etc. Few know that is was originally in the care of the Jesuits from St. Lawrence O’Toole (St. Ignatius Loyola) parish. Indeed, the same architect, William Schickel (from Germany himself), built both churches. St Joseph opened its school in 1880. In 1888 the Jesuits handed over the parish to the Archdiocese; in 1895 the present church was completed. 2)
We have little to report of the subsequent history of this parish. After World War II the German character of the neighborhood disappeared and St. Joseph’s became just one more parish of the Archdiocese. By the 1980’s the German ethnicity of St. Joseph’s had been reduced to one German mass on Sunday. By 2014 there was one German mass a month – with the homily, petitions and announcements in English. Yet St. Joseph’s still claims to be the “German national parish of the Archdiocese of New York.” 3) This loss of identity, however, was counterbalanced at least in part by the post war “gentrification” of the Yorkville. An originally working and middle class area was gradually transformed into an appendage of the wealthy “Upper East Side.”
After the council the interior of St. Joseph’s was subjected to one of the most horrific renovations in New York. As the parish history puts it:
“In the period immediately following the Council, many of the church’s elaborate furnishings, some of them dating from an earlier renovation in the 1950’s, were discarded in the name of liturgical and architectural simplicity. A sense of architectural and decorative tentativeness prevailed until the early 1990’s, when the church finally assumed its present appearance, which successfully combines simplicity and refinement.”4)
While I cannot share the aesthetic judgment of the last sentence, all can agree that the present interior of the church is an improvement over the wasteland of the early 1980’s. Need I mention the quality of the liturgy of that time was entirely in harmony with the post-conciliar décor? So St. Joseph is one of those post-post-conciliar Manhattan churches, like Sacred Heart, St. John the Evangelist or Our Lady of Sorrows, where a subsequent generation has tried to correct the “sins of the fathers” – without attempting a full restoration.
St Joseph’s does have the distinction of being one of the few American parish churches to have been honored by the visit of a pope – Benedict XVI in 2008 (Holy Family, “the Church of the United Nations,” is another in New York). The parish was selected “because the pope was German” but the event was an ecumenical service having little or nothing to do with New York’s Catholic or German heritage. 5)
St. Joseph’s does make a fine impression on the street with its pretty Romanesque façade straight out of Lombardy. In the 1920’s its tower was completed and a fine new school building constructed. That school is still very much in operation – a rarity in New York! For, as we have said, the neighborhood of St Joseph’s has remained more intact than most in Manhattan. Not entirely so – East 86th Street has always been remarkably sleazy considering the wealth of its surroundings and, just as in the 1980’s, the drug traffic rears its head now and then on the surrounding streets. 6)
Inside, the generic “Renaissance” architecture is typical of many churches built a that time – one thinks of St Francis of Assisi, Our Lady of Esperanza or St Ignatius Loyola. Regrettably the furnishings fell victim to the post-conciliar iconoclastic rage – the current “reredos” of Romanesque arches is a poor substitute. But in the darkened interior are still found statues and candles before them. More importantly, the church is open outside of mass times, and there are a few souls praying. The only significant decorative survivals of the past are the windows, probably from Munich. They are not the greatest example of this genre in New York by a long shot: rather small in scale and with images more doll-like than usual. Nevertheless, they are pretty and typical of the era.
(Above) Contributed by the “St.Josephs Kirchenchor”; (below) “Kinder der St. Josephs Schule.”
(Above and below) This window of the raising to life of a dead girl was contributed by the family of a doctor.
We read their German dedications with not a little melancholy. A nation that played such a critical role in the New York of the 19th century seems to have vanished from the earth! All that remains is some lettering on windows dating from before the First World War. But what of the Catholic religion itself? St. Joseph’s parish itself indeed has survived in better shape than most – despite the loss of its original ethnic character and the wounds inflicted by its own clergy. But does not this church, with its jumbled, uncertain interior, reflect, to use a felicitous term from the parish’s history, the “tentativeness” of the entire post-conciliar situation – including, nowadays, the very existence of many parishes in this city?
1) Dunlap, David W., From Abyssinian to Zion: A Guide to Manhattan’s Houses of Worship at 220(Columbia University Press, New York 2004)
2) The Catholic Church in the United States of America, Vol. 3 at 342 (Catholic Editing Company, New York 1914)
3) http://www.stjosephsyorkville.org/germandeutchetra.html (also in German!)
4) http://www.stjosephsyorkville.org/history1.html
5) http://www.stjosephsyorkville.org/history1.html
6) http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/19/nyregion/manhattan-pastor-faces-up-to-drug-dealers-with-prayer-and-a-petition.html?_r=0,
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