The Parish of St. Bernard was established in 1868 in a developing Manhattan Irish immigrant community. From 1873 to 1875 the massive St. Barnard Church was built on 14th Street, one of the busiest streets in New York City. Prior to the Civil War, most Irish churches in America were small and impoverished. The new church would display the growing economic success of these immigrants a quarter-century after the catastrophic Great Hunger that killed off more than a million Irish. Now called the Church of Our Lady of Guadalupe at St. Bernard, it is the center of diverse community of worshippers. The church is in the Gothic Revival style.
Patrick Keely, an Irish immigrant from Tipperary, was the architect who designed the church. He designed roughly 600 churches in the Northeast during the 19th Century. When the cornerstone was laid in 1873, 10,000 people were reported to have attended and the flags of the United States, Germany, France, Ireland, and the Papacy were displayed. The neighborhood was an upscale one, where the mayor of New York City had his house.
Patrick Keely was one of the most prolific church architects of the 19th Century and his works in the 1840s influenced many church designs of the following half-century. Because he was an immigrant from the marginalized Irish immigrant community his life and legacy were minimized by a profession thought to be uniquely white and Protestant.
The church was consecrated by Brooklyn-born Archbishop John McCloskey, the successor to the combative Archbishop John Hughes who died during the Civil War years. In 1875, McCloskey became a Cardinal and St. Bernard’s is said to be the first U.S. church dedicated by a cardinal.
During the 1870s, as the labor struggles in British-occupied Ireland intensified and a revolutionary Irish independence movement became more pronounced, St. Bernard’s was a center of debate in the immigrant community over the future of Ireland.
Although the church is only a half-hour walk from the Old Five Points neighborhood where many in the congregation had lived when they arrive in New York, the Chelsea neighborhood was economically dynamic and middle class. The church reflected achievement. However, in 1871, not far north of the site, a violent confrontation had left sixty dead. The Orange Riots between indigenous Irish who immigrated to New York and members of the Orange Order celebrating the British defeat of the Irish at the Battle of the Boyne had spread fear throughout Manhattan.
In 1890 a fire destroyed the two spires of the church and damaged much of the interior. Just a year later, in 1891, the restored church was rededicated.
The organ originally installed during the Reconstruction Era was destroyed by the fire and a new organ was placed in the loft.
the church is at 328-332 West 14th Street in the Chelsea neighborhood of Manhattan.
An 1891 article on the restored church said that the many stained glass windows were from Tiffany.
Today the church is called the Parish of Our Lady of Guadalupe at St. Bernard’s and its congregation includes a large number of Mexican immigrants. Elements of Mexican Catholicism have been incorporated into the church’s iconography. Of its seven Sunday Masses every week, three are in Spanish.
This drawing shows the church as it appeared before the fire destroyed its spires.
Note: All color photos taken by Pat Young.
