At the corner of Pacific and Sackman Streets, in Ocean Hill, Brownsville, or East New York, is the church of Our Lady of Loreto, by Italians a century ago. An excellent story about this parish appeared in the New York Times, December 29, 2008, titled "A Church that held the neighborhood's heart," link here.
The location is just south of Atlantic Avenue, close to the eastbound platform of the Long Island Rail Road's East New York station.
The parish school closed in 1988.
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On 4.21.2016, the Brooklyn Daily Eagle published a lengthy article about the status of the church of Our Lady of Loreto. Here is the link: Our Lady of Loreto is an Ocean Hill Cultural Treasure.
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In February of 2017, the activities of several organizations to save the edifice continue, as this website attests: link HERE.
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As of August 17, 2017:
https://www.facebook.com/saveOLL/photos/a.1828960780700772.1073741826.1828956094034574/1907278016202381/?type=1&theater
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As of October 16, 2017, the church has been demolished. Curbed NY has a twitter photo of the rubble. Link HERE.
The website for Our Lady of Loreto is www.loretochurch.com
ReplyDeleteThere are some great pictures of that neighborhood and some interesting stories too.
Thank you for a fascinating blog. Although my closest connection with Brooklyn is that my great-grandfather lived and worked there, I've always been intrigued by the borough and its culture, especially the immigrant Catholic experience. I'm enjoying the photos of these beautiful churches. It's heartbreaking to see that some may not survive.
ReplyDeleteYou are right about the rich vein of memory opened on that website. And the people involved in creating it had a strong hand in assuring that the church still stands. But www.saveourladyofloreto.org offers a more complex activist perspective on the history of the OLL devotion as well as the church and the efforts to save it. There is something more than sentiment to the theme opened by the previous commenter. There is something shocking in the inconsiderate loss of a whole class of Catholic churches in old immigrant neighborhoods all over this country, many of them built by the hands of the immigrant faithful themselves. OLL's setting has already been severely compromised, but the church, which is particularly rich in backstory, may be saved as a cultural center. MAY is the keyword.
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