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Find out about the efforts to preserve this important landmark. Please help save St. Brigid's Church!

When the Bell Tolls
By JAKE MOONEY (NYT) 2777 words
Published: March 20, 2005

ON a cold afternoon in February, Peter Cruz drove 40 minutes from Hempstead, Long Island, to the East Village, parked on Avenue B near East Seventh Street, and walked to the steps of St. Brigid's Roman Catholic Church, which has presided over Tompkins Square Park since 1848.

Mr. Cruz, 55, knew the stretch of sidewalk well. He grew up in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, but a blind date with a quiet Lower East Side girl named Rosalie drew him to the neighborhood for good. The couple married in 1973, and stayed in the area until 1991. Even after that, every Sunday they drove to St. Brigid's for Mass, where Mr. Cruz served as a head usher.

On this day, the metal gates in front of the church's steps were locked, and Mr. Cruz waited on the sidewalk in front of the yellow stucco building. After a few minutes, a man leaving the building held a side door open, and Mr. Cruz ducked inside. Hurrying down a hallway, he whispered to a visitor, "I haven't been here since September." Turning into the church, he stopped short. Amid mounds of crumbled plaster, workmen in surgical masks were systematically detaching rows of pews from the floor. Tools and wires were everywhere. A man directing activity near the altar approached Mr. Cruz.

"Who let you in here?" the man asked.

"I just need to take some pictures," Mr. Cruz replied, fumbling with a Polaroid camera and quickly taking a few snapshots.

"Why do you need these pictures?"

"Memories," Mr. Cruz said, backing away toward the door. "Memories."

Pictures and memories are all that most parishioners have left of St. Brigid's, among the oldest Roman Catholic church buildings in New York. The church's main building closed its doors in 2001 because of structural problems, and the final Mass, in the basement of the Catholic school next door, was held last September. All that is left is for the structure itself to come down.

Yet the loss of St. Brigid's will be felt by more than its 200-some parishioners. A church is not an ordinary building. It is often an aesthetic treasure, touched with historic details like stained-glass windows and heavy, inlaid doors, portals for the chords of organ music to spill onto the street. It serves as a beacon on dark nights, a repository of local history, a surveyor of mundane and special events in a neighborhood's daily life. The end of a church, then, is an extraordinary event, even for those who may never hear a sermon, say a prayer or even set foot inside.

"These buildings are often the most beautiful in an area," said Peg Breen, president of the New York Landmarks Conservancy, a private group that still hopes to preserve St. Brigid's, along with several other New York churches. "They give you a sense of the flow of history, of architecture."

She added, "In a sense, you're pulling the heart out of these neighborhoods."

The Queens-born novelist Mary Gordon, who teaches at Barnard College, has vivid memories of the way her local church occupied a central place in neighborhood life, as the site of rituals like Communion and Confirmation, as well as Girl Scout meetings, basketball practices and teenage dances.

"It was both the physical and social locus, and it was very cohesive for the community," she said. "It kind of sacralized the everyday, and it made the sacred accessible and normalized."

But in recent decades, as the population of priests has shrunk, that connection has frayed, and the consequences have been dire. "To cut that tie of localness is a great blow to both people's religious and social lives," Ms. Gordon said, "because it destroys the conduit between the sacred and the ordinary."

At St. Brigid's, neighborhood protests and a fund-raising drive aimed at reopening the church proved fruitless. And so the story of St. Brigid's closing will most likely foreshadow what may happen to other churches in the Archdiocese of New York -- which comprises Manhattan, Staten Island, the Bronx and seven suburban New York counties -- as it undertakes a sweeping reorganization aimed at cutting costs and adapting to a shrinking corps of priests and a shifting Catholic population. Although the closing of St. Brigid's was not part of the formal realignment process, a spokesman for the archdiocese, Joseph Zwilling, said it involved many of the same issues.

What will become of the land St. Brigid's occupies is unclear. The widely held assumption in the neighborhood, however, is that the property will be sold or leased to a developer, who will build something tall and expensive. Mr. Zwilling would say only that several proposals were being considered, but added that whichever one won out, the church would have to be demolished. "I think that will have to happen no matter what," Mr. Zwilling said. "It's an unsafe structure, and efforts to repair it in the past have failed."

For one thing, a large, persistent crack near the building's northeast corner had destabilized its rear wall. The crack was repaired in the 1980's, but diocesan officials determined a decade later that the repair had not held. Last year, the Trinitarian Order, which provided priests for the church, decided to move its members out of the parish in the face of fiscal belt-tightening and a continuing personnel shortage. Faced with a damaged building and a dearth of priests, Mr. Zwilling said, the archdiocese had no choice but to close the church.

The Herald With Two Towers

Sitting with a cup of tea in his sprawling apartment across East Eighth Street from St. Brigid's, Roland Legiardi-Laura gazed out his window at the church's three arched front windows, framed by two towers that decades earlier served as the base for skyward-reaching steeples. Mr. Legiardi-Laura, a high school writing teacher and documentary filmmaker who has lived in the building since 1978, describes himself as no fan of organized religion, but every morning when he stands by that window and thinks through his day, it is St. Brigid's he sees. "You develop an emotional relationship to people, and to buildings," he said as the music of Bob Dylan played in the background. "It's like an old friend."

Mr. Legiardi-Laura, an effusive man with unruly dark hair and a goatee, has found that the church tells him dozens of little things about the neighborhood. If there is a religious parade or procession, it starts there. If there is a red-tailed hawk in the park, the behavior of the pigeons that usually line the church's roof is a dead giveaway. There are constants, too; at night when the lights are on, there is a warm reflection through the stained glass, and during the day it is the kind of building where people passing by always stop to chat.

During his early years in the neighborhood, when Tompkins Square Park was notorious for riots and colonies of homeless people, Mr. Legiardi-Laura counted the church's presence as a blessing. "If a few hundred people are somehow given a moment of peace and support, the neighborhood lives a better life," he said. "How many freaked-out people who were going to do something that they regretted calmed down in that building? I don't know."

He has never seen anyone beaten or robbed in front of the church, he said. "Criminals, if they have any moral sense, are intimidated by that. I've seen drug dealers walk by and cross themselves." The Rev. George Kuhn, who was pastor of St. Brigid's from 1986 to 1995, is well acquainted with the neighborhood's rough side. During his time there, he opened a homeless shelter in the church's basement, and on one Holy Thursday he led parishioners in washing the feet of the homeless.

In 1988, when 50 people were injured in the park during what turned into a violent clash between demonstrators and police officers, the church held community meetings in its basement cafeteria. A year later, when the police dismantled a tent city in the park and rousted the homeless people who had been living there, Father Kuhn led parishioners in support of them.

A contingent from the church marched to an abandoned school on East Fourth Street, to take food to protesters and homeless people who were holed up there. As they drew close, officers told the church leaders they were under orders to arrest anyone who crossed police lines. Within the parish, Father Kuhn's response is legendary: "I said, 'I'm working under orders, too. The order I have is to feed the hungry, and that comes from a higher authority."'

The food was delivered, and the priest was arrested.

In the years since Father Kuhn left the parish, he has received updates from people like Mr. Cruz, and he sees a lot of things he does not like, notably a widening divide between rich and poor. His thoughts on the closing of St. Brigid's, then, may come as a surprise. In the Gospel of John, he notes, Jesus tells a Samaritan woman, "The hour is coming when you will neither on this mountain, nor in Jerusalem, worship the Father." In other words, true worship is not grounded in any earthly place.

"Here's Jesus saying this 2,000 years ago, that the place is not significant, it's the heart," Father Kuhn said. "That's a very important part of our theology. It's part of our humanity, and I would say personally our fallen humanity, that we find comfort in the familiar."

But he understands the bruised feelings of people who want to keep their church. "I don't mean to deny human attachments," he said. "There's a lot of disappointment, and people did a lot of work." He hopes that any dismantling will be handled with sensitivity. "At the least out of respect for the people," he said, "but more than that, I would say out of respect for the holy place that this was."

This Earthly Place

In recent weeks, signs posted on telephone poles all around Tompkins Square Park have warned of sidewalk closings and parking disruptions for the filming of a movie version of the musical "Rent." The East Village depicted in the musical, which is about a group of young bohemians living rough lives in the early 90's, still hovers over the neighborhood like an unsettled ghost, drawing the double-decker tour buses that regularly circle the park. Now, of course, the reality is more complex. On a recent Sunday afternoon, people lined up for brunch at the cafes fringing the park, and toddlers raced around playgrounds with brightly colored monkey bars. In one corner, parents pushed strollers; in another, a farmers' market was in full swing; and in a third, two young men leaned back on a bench and smoked a joint without a glance at the people walking by.

At the head of the park, St. Brigid's was quiet, although this was not how Peter Cruz remembered it; people used to hang around for hours after Sunday Mass. On this Sunday, he wandered around the park, stopping to greet people. At East Seventh Street and Avenue B, he found Trinidad Rivera, a rail-thin, gray-haired woman who used to sleep on a cot in the church's homeless shelter until friends helped her get her life together and persuaded her to become a parishioner.

Mr. Cruz spoke to her in Spanish, then interpreted her reply: "She said: 'I don't read or write, but I miss the church. I was going to be baptized here, but the day before I was supposed to be baptized, they closed the church."'

Another former parishioner, Rosanna Castro, was walking through the park with her son, Steven, 14. Ms. Castro had tried a few other churches, and now attends Our Lady of Sorrows, on Stanton Street near Pitt Street. But her affection for her old church has not changed. "This morning I woke up and I was telling him, 'I miss St. Brigid's so much,"' Ms. Castro said of a conversation with her son. "I was just telling him, I wonder when they're going to knock it down."

After circling the park, Mr. Cruz stood in front of the church, where he encountered Ed Torres and Maria Tornin, two longtime parishioners. They were joined by Carolyn Ratcliffe, who lives around the corner on East Ninth Street. She is an Episcopalian, but she used to attend Mass at St. Brigid's because the church reminded her of a church in her hometown, Natchez, Miss. She still walks her dogs past St. Brigid's every day, and when she sees it from a distance, she knows she is almost home.

Because of the icy wind, the little group walked to the basement office of Rosie Mendez, a neighborhood activist who is running for City Council, and shared their memories of a place that had been threaded through their lives in so many different and sometimes subtle ways. "We kind of took St. Brigid's for granted," Mr. Torres said. "We've always had this expectation that the church would be reopened."

Can St. Brigid's Be Saved?

Mr. Torres has been working with the archdiocese finance office to determine what became of the $103,000 the parishioners raised for repairs. Mr. Zwilling, of the archdiocese, said diocesan officials had not been aware of the fund-raising drive and would not have sanctioned it, though parishioners said they believed they had church permission.

The former Trinitarian pastor of St. Brigid's, the Rev. Michael Conway, said about $30,000 was spent studying the possibility of repairing the church and making the social hall more suitable for Mass, but most of the money was still in the church's bank account when he left. Mr. Zwilling said the archdiocese was still going through the parish records and talking with parishioners to figure out what happened to the rest. "There seems to have been a problem sorting out the money that came in, and what amount, and where it went," he said. "The issue now is going through what records exist."

Still, Mr. Torres said he had made it clear to the archdiocese that the main goal, even ahead of recovering the money, was reopening the church.

There was talk in the room of hiring a lawyer, of getting a restraining order to prevent further gutting of the building. They remembered the Sunday last fall when a bishop arrived at the church and announced that St. Brigid's would be closed. And they remembered the tearful day a month later when the church held its last Mass. "People were there with their children and their children's children, and they were all baptized in that church," Ms. Mendez said. "People were crying because their next great-grandchild will not be baptized in that church, and they knew that."

As the meeting wound down, the old St. Brigid's parishioners, together again, rose and climbed the stairs to go their separate ways. Exchanging handshakes and hugs, they stepped out into the cold Sunday air.

REMEMBERING
Days of Song And Procession

Peter Cruz, who took these photographs in 1993, recalls how the St. Brigid's community took to the streets every year at Christmastime.

"One of the highlights of the church year was the Christmas Posada. That's when the whole church community re-enacted the journey of Mary and Joseph looking for a place for the baby Jesus to be born. "We would go through the neighborhood, two hundred parishioners walking around in procession and song. "Then we would return to the church, and every year the place would be packed. We would put on a play, which was the highlight of the church year.

"In 1993, I played an innkeeper. He'd yell out, 'We don't rent to people like you and we don't have any space.' "We actually had a person that built a manger, on 10th Street between Avenues B and C, and at night it would be all lit up."

Photos: SPIRIT IN THE SKY -- St. Brigid's Roman Catholic Church in the East Village has presided over Tompkins Square Park for more than a century. Ramona Soto, right, attended services. (Photographs by Cary Conover for The New York Times)(pg. 1); PHOTOGRAPHS AND MEMORIES -- St. Brigid's in 1935, below. Since the church held its last Mass in the fall, Rosanna Castro, left, has attended Our Lady of Sorrows on Stanton Street but says, "I miss St. Brigid's so much." At right, parishioners protesting the closing.

METROPOLITAN DESK
About New York; A Prayer For a Church Unsaved
By DAN BARRY (NYT) 875 words
Published: July 30, 2005

WHEN Edwin Torres joined St. Brigid's more than 30 years ago, it seemed a good fit, like dry lips to a brimming chalice. Here was a young man from Puerto Rico, hungering. And here was an old Catholic church, born of hunger. Irish shipwrights built St. Brigid's in 1848 as spiritual shelter for those brothers and sisters who survived steerage on famine ships. Its twin steeples rose over Tompkins Square in proud declaration to nativist New York: we Irish -- we Catholics -- are here to stay.

By the early 1970's, when Mr. Torres first knelt in its coolness, the church was like a creaking ship that had willed its way through many storms, its twin masts of steeples long since removed. But if you lifted your eyes toward the ceiling, you would see small sculptured faces looking back -- the images, it was said, of shipwrights who had built the church and who now could be imagined saying: steady as she goes.

Mr. Torres devoted himself to St. Brigid's. He served as a catechist, sang in the choir, worked as an usher, volunteered as handyman, available whenever the boiler gave out. He witnessed the baptisms of his children and grandchildren at the church. He and his wife, Migdalia, renewed their marriage vows at its altar. About 15 years ago, the east wall started pulling away from the rest of the structure, so the church built three concrete buttresses, but the work was sloppily done by a contractor and never corrected. Meanwhile, a worrisome crack on the north wall grew larger, signaling the risk of collapse. His Eminence, Cardinal Edward M. Egan, visited the church to see it himself, and in June 2001, he ordered the church closed.

The pastor, the Rev. Michael Conway, began celebrating Mass in the parish school's cafeteria. He also established a restoration fund, appealing to parishioners and to others, especially Irish-Americans, who might appreciate the historical significance of St. Brigid's. But he did so without the approval of the archdiocese, according to its spokesman, Joseph Zwilling.

Still, every week the parish bulletin published the amount raised. Little by little, the number grew. Mr. Torres continued as Mr. Everything -- soliciting bids for the restoration work, for example -- because he believed the church's reopening was a matter of when, not if. His faith was misplaced.

In September 2003, the archdiocese quietly filed an application with the city to convert St. Brigid's into apartments. Mr. Zwilling said that despite what the application indicates, the archdiocese never planned a conversion, but instead was protecting its options in the event that people -- wounded parishioners, say -- blocked the more-favored option: demolition. "By this stage," he said, "there was general consensus within the archdiocese that St. Brigid's would not reopen as a church, and would probably be demolished."

The 200 or so parishioners of St. Brigid's did not know this. Every third week they continued to put money in envelopes labeled "My Donation to Rebuild St. Brigid." They eventually raised more than $100,000.

The archdiocese closed just one parish in 2004: St. Brigid's. Given that, Cardinal Egan could have made the announcement himself to Mr. Torres and the other parishioners. He could have explained the prohibitive cost of repairs and the risk of collapse. He could have answered questions, offered counseling, been a shepherd to his flock.

Instead, Bishop Robert Brucato, vicar general for the archdiocese, came to a Sunday Mass in the school cafeteria last August. He told the people of St. Brigid's that in two weeks there would be no St. Brigid's. They cried; they had questions. But the bishop left quickly, Mr. Torres recalls. "He was obviously in a rush to get out."

FATHER CONWAY left soon afterward, but not before entrusting some parish records to Mr. Torres -- including a copy of the year-old application to convert St. Brigid's to apartments. Seeing that document for the first time, he recalled, "really crushed me."

After four years of neglect, St. Brigid's Church has so deteriorated that the archdiocese says that full restoration would cost at least $6.9 million. As for the $100,000 raised through that "unauthorized" fund, it says that it would refund the money to those who provide proof of their donations.

If you are so inclined, pray for these parishioners without a parish. They have formed the Committee to Save St. Brigid's Church. They have solicited bids that they say suggest the wall could be repaired for less than $500,000. They have filed suit against the archdiocese and obtained a court order blocking it from demolishing the church, for now at least.

Pray too for this tone-deaf archdiocese, as its agents remove the valuables from an empty, echoing church. The organ. The crucifix. The statues. And all those sculptured faces of proud Irish shipwrights.

THE CITY WEEKLY DESK
NEIGHBORHOOD REPORT: EAST VILLAGE; Coming Back to Fight for the Church of Their Ancestors
By DAVID SCHARFENBERG (NYT) 514 words
Published: June 18, 2006

IN 1848, as refugees of the Irish potato famine streamed into New York, Irish shipwrights began work on St. Brigid's Church on the eastern edge of Tompkins Square Park.

The church became the community's anchor, but by the late 19th century, most of the Irish had left the neighborhood, and St. Brigid's, known as the Famine Church, was largely forgotten by Irish-Americans eager to bury painful memories of privation.

Even after Cardinal Edward M. Egan closed the church in 2001, calling it structurally unsound, it was St. Brigid's parishioners, mostly Latino, who tried to preserve it. A group of Mexican immigrants sold tamales and tacos once a month to raise money for a restoration fund. A Peruvian contingent held barbecue fund-raisers.

Only after the Archdiocese of New York disbanded the East Village parish in September 2004 and prepared for the church's demolition did Irish-Americans begin to respond to the imminent destruction of a piece of their collective history. "You see all kinds of buildings and monuments," said Paul Dougherty, 52, a video editor whose grandfather worshiped at St. Brigid's, "but very few things bearing the Irish mark."

Mr. Dougherty, who describes the building as "one of the very few landmarks of my people which I can point to," is a volunteer with the Committee to Save St. Brigid's Church, which is trying to preserve the building. According to Marion Casey, who teaches Irish studies at New York University, the sesquicentennial of the famine also played a role, lifting the silence that had surrounded the event. "I think the Irish are a people for whom history and memory are particularly important," Ms. Casey said. "And there are very few opportunities for memory and the tangible to come together in the way that they have at St. Brigid's."

Early last week, the Grand Council of United Emerald Societies and the Ancient Order of Hibernians, two Irish-American fraternal organizations, aligned themselves with the preservationists. "The church was built by Irish immigrants during the famine years," said Bob Gibson, secretary of the Grand Council. "We'd like to keep their memory alive."

On Thursday night, Pete Hamill, Joseph O'Connor and other Irish and Irish-American writers read from their work at a bar on West 45th Street, raising about $20,000 for the Committee to Save St. Brigid's, which has sued to block the archdiocese's demolition plans.

A State Supreme Court justice dismissed the lawsuit in January, calling it an "impermissible intrusion" into Cardinal Egan's authority. But the group has appealed the decision.

Joseph Zwilling, spokesman for the archdiocese, said he understood the attachment to the church, but said that the building was beyond reasonable repair and that closing the church fit in with a broader realignment of the diocese spurred by demographic shifts. The archdiocese, he suggested, is cool to a recent anonymous offer to buy the church and convert it to an unspecified nonprofit use.

But St. Brigid's partisans like Peg Breen, the great-grandchild of famine immigrants and president of the New York Landmarks Conservancy, aren't quitting. "The Irish," she said, "love a good fight." DAVID SCHARFENBERG Photo: The author Malachy McCourt, right, and the musician Larry Kirwan at a fund-raiser for a group dedicated to saving St. Brigid's Church. (Photo by Hiroko Masuike for The New York Times)