Catholic Greenwich Village: Ethnic Geography and Religious Identity in New York City, 1880 -1930

Abstract

Introduction Greenwich Village is a neighborhood of diagonal streets and narrow alleys on lower West Side of Manhattan. Tourists find it an unexpected contrast to Manhattan's rigid grid of north-south avenues and cross-town streets. The area is so different from rest of city that even seasoned New Yorkers will admit that a walk through Greenwich Village can be a disorienting experience. Until morning of September 11, 2001, confused visitors would often look up at twin towers of World Trade Center to regain a sense of direction. The population of Village has long been as distinctive as its topography. Until late in nineteenth century Greenwich Village remained stoutly nativist in a city teeming with immigrants. In early twentieth century it became world-famous as Bohemia of America. More recently it has been home of a thriving gay community.1 For a period of about fifty years, from 1880 to 1930, Greenwich Village was also a vibrant Catholic neighborhood. There were a dozen churches and chapels with their attendant institutions located either in Village proper or immediately adjacent to it caring for at least seven different ethnic groups. In many respects Catholic Greenwich Village was a microcosm of big-city American Catholicism of that era. For that reason it is a researcher's delight today. The compact area and well-defined character of Greenwich Village in those years make it possible for historian to trace complicated interplay among different Catholic ethnic groups that lived there, and between each of them and local Irish-American ecclesiastical power structure. Such an analysis yields some fascinating insights into grassroots strengths and weaknesses of largest Catholic archdiocese in United States at a time when ethnic, urban-centered Catholicism was reaching apogee of its influence in America. Greenwich Village was once a real village, a northern suburb of New York City to which residents of city fled during periodic outbreaks of cholera. As early as 1822, however, an English visitor noted that, though once a separate town, [it] now forms part of city. Nonetheless, for many years thereafter Greenwich Village still preserved its distinctive identity. Amid tenement districts of lower Manhattan it remained a middle-class enclave with a predominantly native-born white Protestant population. As late as 1893 a rather dyspeptic observer commented favorably on humanity of a better sort who inhabited Greenwich Village in contrast to inhabitants of lower East Side of Manhattan, where even bad smells have foreign names.2 By that date, however, Greenwich Village was already in process of a major social transformation as influx of Irish and Italian immigrants from adjacent neighborhoods accelerated flight of middleclass Protestant residents. In 1902 a prominent social worker stated without hesitation that most of people were now Catholic. The anonymous writer of WPA's New York City Guide commented condescendingly that by 1910 the American Ward had become Ward 9, a foreign ward . . . its people faithful followers of Roman Catholic Church and of Tammany. By 1920's Greenwich Village was over-whelmingly Catholic and remained such until deterioration of neighborhood, and then its subsequent gentrification initiated still another social transformation that sent many middle-class Catholic families scurrying to outer boroughs of city.3 The Irish Village Fully half of twelve Catholic churches in and around Greenwich Village had predominantly Irish congregations. Far and away most important of them was St. Joseph's Church, located at corner of 6th Avenue and Washington Place in heart of Greenwich Village. Founded in 1829, St. Joseph's was Mother Church of Catholics in Greenwich Village and fifth oldest parish in whole archdiocese. …