Apparently we were supposed to use the bus ride to Greenville as a semi-tourist ride through Jersey City but because of the bus delay we went straight and fast southwards down Baldwin, Summit  and Garfield Avenues. 

Just below the Medical Center on Baldwin Avenue is a Protestant church  St. John's Episcopal which I had always noticed when taking the Central Avenue bus to my grandparents or to the Jersey Central ferry. I remember my father pointing out to me that even though there  was a cross on the top of that church - in Jersey City usually a sign that the a church was Catholic and not Protestant - this was a Protestant church. But an Episcopalian one which he told me was the closest Protestant church to being Catholic.  I didn't know its name at the time but knew it as Episcopalian and wealthy.

That was then. A few days earlier, disconnected from the tour, I had read in a preservationist news letter that there was a move to place the church on either the state or federal protected sites lists. On the bus the guide told a sad anecdote about the church. Not only was it now abandoned and physically collapsing but even worse, the Episcopalian authorities had sold all the church's stained glass to Japanese collectors for a mere $30,000; and then the Episcopal officials just walked away from the church building.

The first stop was Sacred Heart Church on Jackson/Martin Luther King Avenue. The street's  a major commercial street. I know my parents were familiar with it because at one time they lived relatively close to it; but it was a shopping street that although only 3 or 4 miles from the Heights still could have been on another continent for me. Jersey City / Hudson County is so small and so densely populated that any section had whatever you needed. And if I wanted something really unusual, Manhattan was just as easy to get to as most of the rest of Jersey City;  so there was no reason for me ever to go down to Jackson Avenue.

Sacred Heart is on the east side of the street between Bayview and Bidwell Avenues. The housing stock of the neighborhood, running down the side streets like Bidwell, is good quality Jersey City: two family wood frame houses, a few brick,  three to four feet  apart from one another with stoops or porches. Some are in fairly good looking condition from the outside and the general physical impression of the neighborhood is generally fairly good.

But then there is Martin Luther King Avenue, the main commercial street.  In 50 years this was the only part of Jersey City that I have ever found threatening, and this was at 1pm.

Burned out building shells; all commercial activity gone; men, not boys but men, hanging around with liquor bottles.  One of the tour  participants commented on the bad state of the neighborhood; the guide responded - seriously - that things were much better now than they had been: that the arson had stopped. Again, the only place in Jersey City in over half a century that I felt uncomfortable and depressed to be in.

That feeling was reinforced when we went into the church, which you had to do through a side door at the rectory because the main door was kept locked. You walked through a series of corridors and rooms to enter the church from near the main altar; going through the hallway you see a sign: For the safety of all do not prop the door open.

Both from the outside and the inside the style of the building is completely different from almost every, if not every, other church in the city:  the style is Gothic with the  pointed arches but is horizontal and French instead of vertical and German.

Also unusual is the tower which isn't on the side the way it is in most Jersey City Catholic churches. The original plans called for an unusually tall central tower over the crossing rising. I forget the figure that was given but it was to be far higher than any other steeple or tower in the city, on the scale of St. John the Divine in New York.  You can still see the massive tower supports and their buttresses inside but the tower was never completed the way it had been planned.

The church is also unusual in that it isn't a normal secular church but rather an Ordenskirche -- I'm not sure what that's called in English, maybe order church or monastic church -- in this case the Dominicans.

So to the side of the main altar are the priory seats, carved wooden _____ stalls facing one another. Also, because it is an Ordenskirche attached to a monastery, there's a "private" chapel upstairs [which we saw along with the refectory which has a view out over the main altar].

On the inside the overwhelming color is cobalt blue from the stained glass windows, which are in the "German" / cathedral style and made by a Jersey City company. Unfortunately the picture I took is blurred but at least there is an indication of the blue light that was all throughout this section of the church.

A question began entering my mind at Sacred Heart and got bigger as the tour progressed: is stained glass art special to Jersey City? is it unusual that so much of the stained glass was made and designed in Jersey City? or is this quality artwork found in any major city that was inundated with European immigrants around the turn of the century? I tried asking the question twice but each time because of hustle and bustle the question got lost and I never did get an answer. 

One of the people on the tour was a woman in her 50s or late 40s who had grown up in Sacred Heart parish. She commented that as a child she had walked two blocks to grammar school to Sacred Heart and later two blocks to Jersey City State College [they must have been long blocks] in her late teens.

Her family then left Greenville and moved to Jersey City Heights / Hudson City; when she married and had her own children she left for the suburbs. She spoke a lot to various people, not loudly or ostentatiously, and I found it really good that she wasn't bemoaning the state of the neighborhood and the negative changes that had occurred to it but rather was just describing her personal impressions of a past that had changed so much.

Also among the participants was a dark, slight, well-dressed and attractive woman in her late 20s. When one of the guides mentioned that Sacred Heart was a Dominican church, she asked him if the neighborhood also had a lot of Haitian immigrants as well as Dominican ones. I was flabbergasted.

On the way back northwards to lower Jersey City through Lafayette, we drove along Ocean Avenue in an air conditioned bus that had replaced the broken one, while we were in Sacred Heart. Long stretches of the street are lined with rambler, ranch, Cape Cod houses, all far newer than what's in most of the rest of Jersey City.

By their style and from my knowledge of the area, these houses were built within the last 10 - 15 years replacing the 3 and 4 story houses and tenements that were usual for the area. Since the population of the city has dropped so much, it's possible to have fewer people living per square mile and the housing doesn't have to be so concentrated as it used to be [although it's interesting that I've seen 4 or citations in the past few months that Jersey City is still one of the most densely populated areas of the country]. And I'm guessing that with all the Federal tax money that came in, it was cheaper to demolish and replace the old buildings with new ones than to refurbish the old ones. 

But there is a fly in this ointment:  many, many, many of these new houses have flashing falling off, gutters hanging down, shingles and siding loose. They are too new for it to be poor upkeep; it looks as if really shoddy workmanship and materials were used, since taxpayer money was paying for it and no one looked too closely at how the construction was done.

The tour crowd was a very mixed group of participants. About a third consisted of Jersey City people, like the woman from Sacred Heart parish, going on the tour out of general interest in the city; the other two thirds were somehow connected with the official organs of Jersey City art and historic preservation, [like the Jersey City Landmarks Organization] or else were connected with stained glass manufacture and restoration or stained glass art history or else were general art historians or else were neighborhood organizers.

There was also a NOS category: for example one women with a very broad upper Midwest accent which sounded really strange in a Jersey City setting. Beginning at Saint Joseph's she was giving short lectures on the liturgical symbolism in the stained glass windows. It turned she was not connected with historical preservation or with art but rather with religion. She's a professor of History of Religion at Jersey City State. She was also very very bubbly which I've decided to attribute to her mid west upbringing.

Another participant was a woman who I learned later from conversations with her had to be in her 50s but who looked as if she were in her 40s and if you looked fast at her figure could be in her late 30s. Her German accent was still noticeable after having lived in the US, apparently mostly in Hudson County for 30+ years. I learned in the  conversations with her that she had been a gelernte Buntglaskonservatorin - imagine that on your US job resume - had worked in a cathedral workshop in Germany, had somehow wound up in Jersey City where she resumed her stained glass work, apparently mostly preservation, and had recently taken over her employer's business or else had established her own new stained glass business. 

She also was one of the pioneers living in downtown Jersey City, renovating her own brownstone which is near the library. One of her neighbors was another participant who - based on their conversations - has an especially large mansion-like brownstone which is spectacularly renovated including a great deal of stained glass, some of which was original and restored but some of which he had commissioned for his house. 

He was accompanied by an artist who wasn't living in Jersey City. He told me lived on/near Union Square in Manhattan where he worked from his studio but where he was also able to have an apparently fairly large garden ---- in midtown Manhattan.

 There were two guide leaders, one from the Jersey City Landmarks, John Gomez, and one a photographer, Leon Yost,  who had made the photographs for the Jersey City Stained Glass  Calendar 2004 calendar and who knew the ins and outs of the buildings we were in both historically and physically. His wife, who wasn't on the tour, is a teacher at Saint Peter's Prep. 

The next stop on the tour was the Polish church, Saint Anthony Padewskiego, in Lower Jersey City near the Pavonia/Newport PATH station that I had written you about a few months ago. 

Because of the Landmarks and Calendar connections we got a formal tour of the church art and architecture, not just of the stained glass, from the pastor, Father Joseph Urban. He's foreign-born, has very good English but with a very pronounced Polish accent. 

Originally and up to about 30 years ago the  church had 20,000 parishioners. There was a dramatic downturn in numbers when the city went into the economic and social tailspin in the late 70s and the 80s but now the number of parishioners is heading upwards, both from the gentrifiers moving in from Manhattan and from Poles emigrating to the United States.

He is very energetic about strengthening the parish and preserving the church building. He had just gotten the church added to the Historic Preservation Registry. What I found really interesting was that those participants who were connected with historic preservation were amazed that he had been able to get through the bureaucratic paper maze by himself and get the church building entered. Some of them, who were professionals in the field, had not even known that he had gotten that status which had just occurred a few days earlier.

Among the things we learned from him were details about this specially made kneeler in front of the Miraculous Crucifix [click pictures below and to the right to see full size]; his pointing out that all the wooden tracery which overwhelms you when you enter the church is hand carved; the marble of the altar and the other parts of the church is Carrara marble from Italy.

He also showed us how the mechanics of the Black Virgin / OLC  icon functioned and explained the meaning of the icon and the connection to Cracow for the non-Catholics who didn't understand it [although again I was surprised that people in art history would not know of this as an artistic and cultural phenomenon]. 

As I said he was very energetic and good at organizing and he wound up with a pep talk asking for the various groups' support and passed out a centenary [actually a centenary and a fifth] medal -- all in a very unobtrusive and un-annoying way.

While we were gathering outside for the bus to pick us up, he pointed out the brownstone facing of the church which - as you know - was cheap to use for building in Manhattan and Hudson County in the 19th century, since it was a local material. But it has the major disadvantage that it's porous and after 70-80 year begins to crack and split from water entering into the stone, freeing and expanding. There is an enormous cost of $300,000 hanging over the church's head to have the stone restored.

But there is a worse problem hanging over his and the church's head: at Sacred Heart one of the brothers was discussing with one of the guides the rumor that the archdiocese was going to close down the church. The discussion at St. Anthony's was that this church was in the same danger. A few days later the official list of closures came out and both St. Anthony's and Sacred Heart [and for that matter the Cathedral in Newark!!!] were on the list. From what little I perceive, Sacred Heart is lost but St. Anthony's has a fighting chance. 

As you know, Saint Anthony's Polish Catholic almost touches another Catholic church, the Italian Holy Rosary. As we arrived for the Saint Anthony segment of the tour the bus unloaded in front of Holy Rosary whose priest was outside painting one of the doors. One of the participants from New York made a joshing comment about all the friction there must have nee between the two nationalities. The priest said that from the very beginning in the 19th Century there was never any friction or problems but rather a lot of cooperation. It was just that each group wanted to feel comfortable in its own parish.

I learned from the pastor at Saint Anthony's that I might be able to get my father's and uncle's baptismal certificates and other records on them in the church and the school. But there was no time on this trip to get to the office during the hours M-F 9-5 201-563-0343.

Next  up to The Heights, passing by the courthouse again [where Glenn Cunningham, the mayor of Jersey City, was making a visit and the guides, some of whom were apparently involved in the political fight with him about the future of the Loews Theater at Journal Square, were trying to wave to him; he died suddenly of a heart attack about three weeks later] and then passing by St. Paul's Lutheran near the Five Corners, which is to be a stop on next year's tour. We drove up Summit Avenue into Hudson City, where we got off at Bowers Street at the Grace English Lutheran Church, about 3 or 4 blocks from Thorne Street where I had grown up a third of my life.

From the outside the church is small, but more importantly for the impression it makes, it's shingled with vinyl siding and looks very domestic and unprepossessing, if not cheap. Of the two Protestant churches on Summit Avenue that I used to walk by regularly, if not daily, this was the one that was really overlook-able. In fact, probably because it is so drab and because it was something I had seen most of my life, I forgot to take a picture of the exterior and scanned this from the calendar.

The interior layout, although overly plain and sober, was formal and did fit its function as the public assembly of a church. The interior also looks very un-city, almost like something you would find in the Adirondacks. The  ceiling is low for a church and there are exposed wooden beams and rafters. 

The church's stained glass was the "American" technology but the style that we were looking at was different than that in all the previous stops. The guide referred to the style as art deco.

But much of the windows style looked more like restrained illustration that could be from anywhere in the US anytime in the first half of the Twentieth Century. Also unusual for this church as compared to the other stops, was that most of the glass was much newer than that in  the other churches and the courthouse which were basically pre-WW I. In this church the glass hadn't been made and installed until much later,  a lot of it after WW II and some of it as late as the mid 1950s, although installation of some had begun before WW I, as with the other churches and the courthouse.

I believe, but maybe I misunderstood, that we were told that this was the only stop of the tour where the stained glass had not been produced in Jersey City, but rather out in Clifton, J & R Lamb Studios, a Clifton glass manufacturer in business since 1857 - or maybe the firm had moved to Clifton from Jersey City. The German woman I mentioned earlier told me that she had been working for this firm for awhile. She and one of the guides commented on the company which had made the glass as being led by a woman Katherine Lamb Tait, and a Dutchman, Hendrick Vandeburgt, who apparently are major names in the stained glass world. 

The pastor made a short speech saying that the low-key exterior of the church was really a blessing since they didn't have to worry about the windows being damaged by stones being thrown through the window; I found his statement odd because the way the church is situated and surrounded so closely, in fact almost abutting the houses to its left and right,  there's little way anyone could see the windows much less have space to wind up do a throw. I also noted that none of the other churches had had that problem.

This was the last stop of the tour and one reason it was scheduled that way was because the church had held a bazaar that afternoon and there were to be meatball sandwiches - "the best in Hudson County" they said - and homemade salads and cakes which we could use for supper. Because of the extreme heat and humidity I had no appetite so it didn't matter to me that they had sold out of all the sandwiches before we got there. We did get coffee and very good homemade cake, cake made by the white haired ladies who were serving it, and one of them, the coffee cake was like finding the Holy Grail after the bland coffee cakes in Virginia and by Entenmann.

Several things about the church besides the contrast between interior and exterior stood out. When you see the church's interior and read the history, you see that the congregation, which was probably always a tiny, tiny, fraction of any of the Catholic parishes of the city, was not working-class but towards the upper end of middle-class. They were not the kind of people who were in Hudson City when I was growing up there and I suspect that they had long left the city - the same way the Dutch descendents had done -  and only came on Sundays for services. 

Another noteworthy thing at the church was the gay liberation flag hanging outside the church and the bulletin board which had many events and objects that were cute, like the Hugs Program, which didn't match with the white haired lady parishioners who we saw there at the bazaar. Little was said directly but putting 2 and 2 together [and maybe getting 5], it looks like the church could no longer maintain itself as a normal old line Protestant church, got a homosexual pastor, and is now used as both a normal Protestant church for the older parishioners who are dying off, as a homosexual cultural center for the area, and as a neighborhood social service center. But I'm deducing all that and maybe it's not true.

On several occasions during the tour mention was made of  new magazine that had just begun publishing: Jersey City Magazine, concerned mostly with history of the city but also art and architecture. Before I went back home I tried in 4 or 5 newsstands but couldn't find it. It's not listed in the internet and so far the people from the groups running the tour haven't responded to my question on where to subscribe to t.

One of the places I tried to find the magazine was the Hudson Newsstand on Central Avenue and Bowers Street;  I then  walked a little on Central Avenue and noticed that the Italian bakery at Congress Street now has the name of the German bakery that had been across the street and which had closed many years ago, Goehrig's. When I stopped in I could see it was still an Italian bakery, not the baked goods style I prefer.