Angel Guardian Home, Dyker Heights

This article from the Brooklyn Daily has an excellent photo and history of Angel Guardian Home in Dyker Heights.

Photos from other sources

Skilled photographers have added many pictures of the churches and schools of Brooklyn to the immense collection on flickr.com
For example, when one goes to the Flickr group pool "Catholic School Architecture" and searches within this group for "brooklyn," the result is astounding.
Please see the link HERE.
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I particularly applaud the work of Matthew X. Kiernan, who has added many photos to that group. Please see his photo stream HERE. He has uploaded more than 14,000 photos, and they are searchable. Type the name of the parish in the search box, and you will probably find better photos than what I have offered on my blogs.

St. Ann, Vinegar Hill

I saw St. Ann's church in Vinegar Hill years before I began taking photos for this blog. The church designed by Patrick Keely was demolished, and now a fight has arisen about development of the property.  One of the later pastors was Fr. Fursey O'Toole.
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Link to an article with photos in The Brooklyn Daily Eagle 1.25.2017 HERE.

Open House and Registration at Brooklyn Catholic elementary schools

The Tablet website has posted a list of Open Houses and Registration Days during Catholic Schools Week at the end of January, 2017.
The link is HERE.
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Because only six Brooklyn schools are listed at the above link, I refer you to the complete list of Catholic elementary schools in Brooklyn HERE.

St. Barbara, Bushwick

The mailing address of the parish of St. Barbara is 138 Bleeker St., Brooklyn NY 11221, telephone 718-452-3660. The parish has an excellent new (2016) website, linked HERE.
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Leonard Eppig, a brewer, it is said, had a daughter Barbara and son Leonard. He was born in 1839 and before he died in 1893, he was a benefactor in establishing two parishes.  About 1905-1910, his family gave generously to the construction of St. Barbara's church and nearby St. Leonard's. Far more important to me, however, is that my mother-in-law was baptized in this parish, her wedding to Bob was here in 1930, and my wife and her aunts also received Baptism here. I think Eppig and his generation called this neighborhood Bushwick, but many call it Ridgewood.

The school, long staffed by the Dominican Sisters of Amityville, closed in 1973, during an era when the people of Bushwick suffered from fires deliberately set in residences. Much has been rebuilt since, and the parish remains an active help in the community.
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The above photo and text is copied from my original post in 2008. The web newspaper Brooklyn Daily Eagle of 12.14.2016 has run an article "St. Barbara's Roman Catholic Church in Bushwick Gets Landmarked," linked HERE.
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The unanimous vote means that the Landmarks Preservation Committee must approve before the church is demolished or the exterior changed.  The article informs us that the architect was Frank Helmle (1869-1939). The style could be called neo-Plateresque or Spanish Mission Revival.  (That contradicts my assumption that the style was Bavarian or Austrian.)  I frequently look from the J train to see its 175-foot towers.

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For other buildings designed by Frank J. Helmle, please see The Brownstoner HERE.  He designed St. Gregory the Great church.

Choosing a Catholic High School

The Test for Admission to Catholic High Schools is accepting applicants now.  Parents are urged to look at this information site and read each of the links in the left-hand column.  You may have to print out some of the forms and directions. The list of schools is posted sideways on the PDF, so printing those pages would help you to read the information. It would appear that the nine Catholic high schools of the borough of Brooklyn offer 1,300 places for incoming freshmen. Please note, however, that the TACHS exam will forward your score to three high schools, and these can be in any of the five boroughs. Some residents of Brooklyn, for example, live near the transit bus routes to Staten Island. Other Brooklynites live adjacent to Queens, where the nine Catholic high schools offer 2,160 freshman seats. The M train serves Christ the King HS directly.  Boys may wish to travel to Manhattan for Regis High School (no tuition), La Salle Academy, or Xavier.
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Please also note the dates of the Open House visitations and the Information Fairs.
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The cost of the test is $63.
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Religious Ed enrollment 2015

The 2016 Official Catholic Directory, recently published, gives religious education enrollments in most of the Catholic parishes in the borough of Brooklyn. Presumably most of the counts are from 2015 or earlier, and some of the figures are missing, so my totals are inexact.
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In the ninety or so parishes of Kings County, there seem to be 15,146 children enrolled in CCD or religious education classes, many on Sunday mornings, others during the week. The median enrollment is about 157, or maybe 20 youngsters per grade. In Nassau County, the median enrollment is about 430. A few Brooklyn parishes did not give figures, but their bulletins refer to a program. 
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The highest reported enrollments seem to be Good Shepherd (430), St. Martin of Tours (442), St. Joseph Suydam St. (572), and Blessed Sacrament (582). Eighteen parishes report fewer than eighty students in CCD.
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Thirty of the thirty-four academies or elementary schools in Brooklyn reported a total enrollment of about 7,450.  The largest enrollments seem to be at St. Bernadette, Midwood Catholic, Saint Saviour, and St. Bernard of Clairvaux. Six reported enrollments under 225. Salve Regina,with 22 teachers, seems to have many students, but the enrollment was not given.
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I wish that the schools' websites would report enrollment per grade level.