Church Problem in New York

When news spread the other day that work crews were draping black steel netting over the facade of Our Lady of Loreto Church, the people fighting to save the building from demolition found themselves stymied — and reflecting on a yearlong campaign at the brink.

For them, it has been a campaign for their past, embodied in an architectural treasure in a blighted neighborhood in the Brownsville section of Brooklyn. The church, with its frescoed ceilings and fine Italian statuary, was built by Italian immigrants with their own hands in the early 1900s, on land farmed by the first Italian settler in America, because they did not feel welcome in German-speaking and Irish Roman Catholic parishes.
“This is not just about a church,” said Charles Piazza, the leader of the effort, who has resolved to fight on. “It’s about a piece of the Italian-American heritage — a symbol of how we made a place of our own in this country.”
But mixed with the pride and defiance of the advocates — some former parishioners, some history buffs, most of them Italian-Americans — was an equal share of self-criticism.
“Why don’t we Italian-Americans have the kind of clout that other ethnic groups have?” asked Mario Toglia, a retired New York City schoolteacher from Long Island. “The Irish, the Jewish, the African-American and Latinos — all these other groups have an ability to come together around a cause and fight. But not us.”
It is a question that for many years has quietly nagged many Italian-Americans in the form of a paradox: Individuals of Italian heritage have scaled the highest ranks of government, business and entertainment; yet, as a group, they seem flummoxed by the notion of making common cause.
They lament that they cannot coax Hollywood off its addiction to organized-crime stereotypes, or draw more than a ribbon of spectators to the Columbus Day Parade in New York. And now, despite support from the New York Landmarks Conservancy and even an inquiry from the Vatican, they have not rescued Our Lady of Loreto.
The Diocese of Brooklyn has moved to raze the church, on Sackman Street, so that 88 units of much-needed housing for low-income residents can be built in the neighborhood, which is now home to Latinos and African-Americans.
Underscoring the paradox, the man who ordered the demolition, Bishop Nicholas A. DiMarzio, is an Italian-American.
“He knows, believe me, he understands the irony of all this,” said the bishop’s spokesman, Msgr. Kieran E. Harrington. “But it’s a question of facing reality. We have a real plan, which will make a real difference in this community. The other side has wishful thinking.”
Over the past decade, as Catholic officials in New York have closed underused churches and schools, there have been many battles. About a dozen churches have been demolished, and at least a dozen more are in limbo, draped for demolition while parishioners mount campaigns to reopen them.
Yet this fight is different. Former parishioners do not pretend that the neighborhood can support Our Lady of Loreto, which has been closed for more than a year.
Instead, they have gathered behind a proposal by a loose coalition of Italian-American advocates and African-American leaders, including the developer Jeffrey Dunston, to convert the church into an arts pavilion and community center. The culture center would be the anchor for 90 to 100 units of low-income housing, a few more than in the church’s plan. Mr. Dunston, chief executive of the nonprofit Northeast Brooklyn Housing Development Corporation, has built hundreds of low- and moderate-income housing units in the neighborhood over the past 15 years.
But church officials say their own plan is “shovel ready,” awaiting formal go-aheads from city and state financing agencies. The plan offered by Mr. Dunston and Mr. Piazza lacks financing, they said, and underestimates the cost of converting an aging church into a community center.
Last week, Bishop DiMarzio extended an olive branch, offering to insert some of the church’s outdoor statues into the facade of one of the new apartment buildings.
Flavia Alaya, an architectural historian who has been working to preserve the 1908 church, called the proposal “grotesque.”
Ms. Alaya, who has studied the works of the church’s architect, Adriano Armezzani, and its builders, Antonio and Gaetano Federici, called Our Lady of Loreto one of the finest examples of a Roman Renaissance style embraced by Italian-American artists at the turn of the 20th century in an effort to introduce neoclassical architecture to American cities.
She pleaded with Bishop DiMarzio in a letter last month to cancel the “irreversible demolition of this extraordinary century-old church” while Mr. Piazza and Mr. Dunston arrange their financing. And she wrote to a Vatican commission that oversees historic preservation, which promised to review the case.
A similar battle was recently won by a coalition of Latino parishioners, Irish-American organizations and the serendipity of an anonymous donor who gave $20 million to save St. Brigid’s Church, in the East Village, which was built by Irish immigrants in the 1840s.
“This will be the test of whether Italian-American clout is equal to that,” Ms. Alaya said.
Mr. Piazza, a commercial real estate broker, said he had been talking with supporters about what to do next, including legal options. “The fight is on,” he declared.
After more than a year of promoting the campaign with mass e-mail messages and a sophisticated chain of linked blogs, he has recently begun to attract the attention of Italian-American leaders outside Brooklyn. For various reasons, none had taken the effort too seriously until the steel netting went up last week.
“Italian-Americans have money and power, but they do not really have a sense of cultural cohesion,” said the president of the Italian Historical Society of America, John J. LaCorte. His father, John N. LaCorte, is credited with bringing the Columbus Day Parade to Fifth Avenue and persuading officials in 1964 to name a new bridge in honor of the first European explorer to enter New York harbor, Giovanni da Verrazano.
“It may have to do with how much some of the other ethnic groups of New York are bound by historic oppressions,” Mr. LaCorte said, citing African-Americans, the Irish and the Jews. Italians were treated badly when they arrived, he added, but had endured nothing like slavery, pogroms or mass starvation.
Stella Grillo, president of the New York commission for social justice of the Order of the Sons of Italy in America, said she planned to support efforts to save Our Lady of Loreto and would recommend that the national organization throw its weight behind the campaign.
Ms. Grillo diagnosed the problem of Italian-Americans this way: “We don’t know how to toot our own horn. This is a country where you’ve got to do that.”

David Mikael Taclino
Inyu Web Development and Design
Creative Writer

Posted in: Church Problem in New York