Three Chapters in the Architecture of Catholic Philadelphia

by Michael J. Lewis, appearing in Volume 45

For the first fifty years of its existence, Philadelphia had no Catholic church. When Catholicism did come, at first tentatively, then massively, it left its mark on the Quaker city. Vast neighborhoods were shaped by Catholic immigrants from Ireland, Italy, Poland, and elsewhere. But the Catholic presence in Philadelphia— architecturally and otherwise—could not help but be shaped by the culture of the city itself, and that culture was profoundly Quaker.

In the Society of Friends, a dissenting Protestant denomination that worshipped in silence, anyone could stand and speak, if moved by “the inner light.” There was no minister to conduct a formal ritual—no minister, and therefore no pulpit. Unlike a Puritan meeting, which was similar in its plainness and auditorium-like character but imposed a strict hierarchy on the space, the Quaker meeting was non-hierarchical, spatially egalitarian—like William Penn’s gridded plan of Philadelphia of 1682, which is itself the enlarged plan of a Quaker meeting.

This had far-reaching architectural consequences, for it gave the city its physical scale, which is a creation of the seventeenth century. The average Philadelphia street is just twenty-six feet wide, and many are far smaller, nearly microscopic (as first-time visitors discover when they try to park). The tight rectilinearity of those streets ensured an equally tight division of building lots, partitioned into the repetitive module of the Philadelphia rowhouse. All these factors—the scale, the Quaker insistence on plainness, the reliance on red brick and marble stoops—have given Philadelphia its astonishingly consistent spatial order.

Strangely, those constraints of scale, materials, and local custom did not inhibit architectural creativity but acted to enhance it. Philadelphia has produced more than its share of architectural prodigies: Louis Kahn, Robert Venturi, and Frank Furness all contended with Philadelphia’s peculiar character to make buildings of heroic vitality. After all, the armature of wires around a bonsai plant does not kill the plant but makes it flourish. The flip-side of the Quaker insistence on plainness is their willingness to tolerate the blunt expression of unadorned architectural fact, what Venturi called the “ugly and ordinary.” It is against this backdrop that Philadelphia’s Catholic architecture emerged.

Suppression, Flames, Recovery

Philadelphia’s first Catholic church was Saint Joseph’s, which today prebuilding but its site. Its cast-iron columns and splendid Ionic reredos date from the renovations of 1838. But it retains its character as a gentle and intimate sanctuary, which was forced upon Saint Joseph’s, like it or not. Much like a European synagogue of the eighteenth century, it was tucked out of sight so as not to provoke the majority population. It was approached by an alley leading to a still smaller alley. As it happened, they had good reason to worry.

Over the course of the eighteenth century, other denominations settled in Philadelphia and flourished. Quakers were no longer a majority in Philadelphia by 1754, when Scull and Heap’s celebrated East Prospect of the City of Philadelphia showed a skyline marked by the steeples of Anglican, Presbyterian, Dutch Calvinist, and Lutheran churches. Shortly thereafter, in 1763, a Catholic church could dare to present itself on the street, if in modest fashion. This was the church on Fourth Street now known Old Saint Mary’s. Several members of the Continental Congress were Catholic and worshipped here; later both George Washington and John Adams would visit during their presidencies.

It became Philadelphia’s Catholic cathedral in 1810, at which time it assumed its current form in that boxy, linear neoclassical Gothic of the era.

The members of these early congregations were typically Anglo-Catholic, French, or German Catholics, and relatively small in number. In 1789, Philadelphia Germans built Holy Trinity, perhaps the first explicitly ethnic Catholic parish in the United States. In the 1830s, Philadelphia experienced for the first time Catholic immigration on a massive scale, almost entirely from Ireland. More churches were needed, especially in the waterfront areas where Irish laborers clustered. This did not sit well with all native-born Protestant Philadelphians, who called themselves (with no sense of irony) Native Americans. For the first time the city confronted the specter of openly expressed, unabashed public bigotry. “No Irish need apply” was a standard stipulation in Philadelphia want ads from 1840 through the Civil War.

Tensions worsened after Francis Kenrick was made bishop of the diocese of Philadelphia (1842–1851) and promptly petitioned the Philadelphia school board to exempt Catholic children from having to sing Protestant hymns, recite Protestant prayers or read from the “Protestant” King James Bible. This came at a time of labor unrest—the economy had still not recovered from the Panic of 1837—and Irish immigrants were resented as competing with native-born workers. All this boiled over in the great nativist riot of May 8, 1844, when a mob looted and burned the church of Saint Michael, in the waterfront Kensington District. It also destroyed the Catholic school at Second and Phoenix streets, where the Irish had supposedly stockpiled arms.

Flushed with success, the mob turned its attention to a much more important church, Saint Augustine. Designed by the elusive Irish immigrant Nicholas Fagan in 1801 (the tower was added by William Strickland in 1829), this was the finest of the early Philadelphia churches.

Unlike the previous two destroyed buildings, which were outside the original city limits, Saint Augustine was in Philadelphia proper, which alarmed the Mayor, who arrived on horseback (when did an American mayor last arrive anywhere on horseback?) and tried to persuade the mob to disperse. For a few hours there was a standoff until a teenage boy broke into the church vestibule and started a fire, after which Saint Augustine likewise fell to the flames.

Although order was restored, a second riot followed on July 7. This time the Pennsylvania Militia intervened decisively, and in a timely enough fashion to save the church of Saint Philip de Neri in the Southwark district. There would be no further church burnings.

Bishop Kenrick now considered how Philadelphia’s Catholics should respond to the violence. Recognizing that it was hopeless to try to change the fundamentally Protestant orientation of the public school system, he opted instead to retreat from that system and to see that each parish in the city had its own school. There were just eight such schools at the time of the riots; by 1895 there would be ninety-eight. Here was the origin of Philadelphia’s parochial school system.

But even as Bishop Kenrick withdrew from one realm of public life, he proclaimed the Catholic presence in another, and that was by building a monumental cathedral on one of Philadelphia’s most prominent public squares. It would show the Nativists, and the city at large, that the Catholic population would not be cowed and that they were an integral part of the city’s life. The result was the Cathedral Basilica of Saints Peter and Paul (1846- 1864) on Logan Circle, which remains one of the most remarkable American cathedrals.

For his architect, the Bishop turned to Philadelphia’s sole Catholic architect, Napoleon LeBrun, who was the logical choice. LeBrun was something of a child prodigy, having designed a pair of Greek Revival churches in 1841 when he was just twenty years old (and moonlighting as the organist of Saint Joseph’s). He had already been handed the assignment of rebuilding the burned hulk of Saint Augustine, while updating its turn-of-the-century neoclassical severity.

The cathedral posed a more vexing problem because it was not at all clear what style it should be built in. The natural choice was Gothic. After all, at this very moment, Germany had begun the process of completing Cologne Cathedral, one of the largest Gothic cathedrals. The political symbolism was analogous: Cologne was in the Rhineland, where its minority Catholic population felt itself oppressed by its Protestant Prussian rulers; the Gothic offered a way to assert their identity by architectural means, as a kind of sublimated political statement. The argument was attractive, and surely inspired New York Catholics to follow the twin-towered cathedral model of Cologne when building Saint Patrick’s Cathedral (begun 1853).

But Bishop Kenrick was not interested in the Gothic or its political meaning. He was not by nature a provocateur, and even during the worst of the riots adopted a stance of quietism. He felt the cathedral should be built in a style that would show fidelity to Rome, hardly a surprising choice for a man who had studied there at the Pontifical Urban University. He admired the mighty Counter-Reformation leviathans of the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, particularly Il Gesu. Taking this as his model, LeBrun designed a basilica with a transept, a dome over the crossing, and a semicircular apse. The proportions are grand: the nave is fifty feet wide and 216 feet long (it has since been extended) crowned by a deeply coffered barrel vault carried on massive piers. All work in union to create a stately processional rhythm.

Only one details suggests the lingering trauma of the riots. The eight side chapels are windowless, the light coming in from an oculus in the ceiling. These blank walls give the exterior its forbidding austerity. According to immemorial Philadelphia tradition, they are the legacy of the 1844 riots, the windows beginning only at a point above which you cannot fling a stone.

LeBrun would have given his cathedral a restrained classical façade, a tripartite scheme with a simple central entrance between two square belltowers. It was sober rather than inspiring, and when he was discharged in 1851, around the time of Bishop Kenrick’s transfer to Baltimore, the design was abandoned along with LeBrun. His successor, Philadelphia architect John Notman, designed the monumental façade of the present building, a superb rendition of a Roman Corinthian temple, executed in brownstone of uncommonly high quality.

LeBrun was summoned back in time to complete the cathedral, whose dedication at the end of the Civil War ended the first chapter of the Catholic experience in Philadelphia, signaling its triumphal emergence from out of the catacombs, so to speak, into the light. But already the conditions for Catholic architecture were changing, and the postwar era would produce churches, schools, and convents of a very different character.

Immigration, Diversification, and Professional Monopoly

Now began the great era of mass migration to the United States, much of it from east and south Europe, and much of it Catholic. Coming to Philadelphia, they formed distinct parishes that preserved their ethnic identity and language of origin, especially Polish, Italian, and Slovak. It is difficult to imagine an architect better qualified to dramatize national identity than Edwin Forrest Durang (1829-1911), an architect who came from a prominent theatrical family and whose early training was in different aspects of popular entertainment and show business.

Until the end of the Civil War Durang, though Catholic, had given little thought to winning Catholic patronage. He would have faced a formidable rival. In 1850, the young Irish architect John T. Mahony (c. 1820-1863) won the competition for Saint John’s Orphan Asylum in West Philadelphia. Sensing professional opportunity, he moved to Philadelphia where he designed at least nineteen churches and schools in the next decade. The churches tended to be modest Gothic affairs, virtually none of them surviving, and today he is virtually forgotten.

Mahoney’s death during the Civil War opened the field to Durang, who came belatedly to architecture. He first appears as a Philadelphia artist and lithographer in 1848, making satirical political cartoons in the overwrought early Victorian manner, which he published in lithograph form. Presumably his early training as an illustrator came about through working on stage scenery and costume design in family productions. The cartoon market collapsed after the election of 1848, and he moved to Cincinnati; there he worked on that peculiar ancestor of the motion picture, the moving panorama.

Durang worked on the Mammoth Panorama of the Mississippi, which was advertised as “the largest painting in the world,” consisting of 45,000 square feet of canvas. Its massive painted backdrop slowly unspooled before the audience, with the novelty of showing “both sides of the River at once.” Durang, one of three artists who painted it, would have drawn a great many riverside trees and houses; here he learned to give buildings exaggerated and spirited outlines, a skill that would come in useful later when trying to distinguish one church from another. After working on several panoramas and touring the country, Durang returned to Philadelphia in 1851 and invented himself as an architect, specializing in the design of theaters and public halls.

Durang first made his mark as a Catholic architect with a pair of neo- Baroque churches: Saint Anne’s, Port Richmond (1866-1869), and Saint Charles Borromeo, South Philadelphia (1868-1876), which carry on the neo-Baroque theme of the new cathedral. Each was a stone colossus with a turbulent sculptural façade and distressingly sober side elevations. In a certain sense, these churches were not architectural at all. The façade was essentially a frontispiece, something that could be slid in and out of place like an item of stage scenery.

If the façade was theatrical in conception, so too was the interior that it fronted, a roomy auditorium of a space that differed little from his contemporary theater and opera designs. Each was a capacious gathering space, with clear lines of sight and vision, its seats (or pews) facing a raised stage (or chancel). When he added galleries, as he did at Saint Charles Borromeo, the resemblance to an auditorium was even stronger.

These two prominent churches swiftly brought him other church commissions. In the next decade he would design a dozen, and dozens more would follow. If we add in the countless schools, hospitals, convents, and rectories, the number becomes stupefying. During these years of peak immigration, Durang drew on his experience painting architectural scenery to design churches that suggested national origin. A German parish, such as Saint Joachim’s Frankford (1874-1880), would get a Gothic building; an Irish parish, such as Saint Francis Xavier (1893-1898), would get a brawny Romanesque building (a Gothic church might have reminded them of their Anglican oppressors in Britain). And there was no question that Saint Mary Magdalen de Pazzi (1883-1891), “the first in the United States used exclusively by Italians,” would be Roman Renaissance. (A Polish church admitted more flexibility at a time when there was no Polish nation and could be either Renaissance or Gothic).

Durang’s churches were built to hold enormous crowds, large working class families of modest means. Behind the pyrotechnics of their façades was invariably a space designed for maximum clarity of sight and sound. A typical specimen was Our Lady of Visitation (1876), a twin-towered Gothic goliath that held 1300. Saint Francis Xavier was even larger, seating 1370 parishioners (and another eighty in the gallery).

Gothic churches posed a special problem for Durang, especially when arranged in three aisles, separated by rows of columns. Such a plan violated his impulse to make his churches as auditorium-like as possible. At Saint James, West Philadelphia (1881-1887), we see him struggling with the problem. He shrank his columns to virtual nothingness, as slender as pipes and, in a sense, they were pipes, since he used cast iron columns, grouped in spindly shafts, grained to simulate granite. The next step was to dispense with the columns entirely, which he did at Our Mother of Good Counsel, Bryn Mawr (1896-1897). Here he suspended the clerestory on internal steel beams so that no columns were necessary. Only the florid capitals remain beneath the clerestory arches to show where the supports might have been placed, dangling in midair as if resting on hypothetical columns.

Durang was still in practice at the age of eighty-six, when on the morning of June 12, 1911, he visited the church of Saint Monica, which he had designed a decade earlier, in order to measure the site of its new convent. He left the monsignor in a hurry, explaining that his daughter was getting married that afternoon, walked one block, and died. (The wedding went on without him.) For nearly half a century, Durang had controlled the architecture of Catholic Philadelphia, a denominational monopoly that no other American architect has known, or ever will. This is not to say that he was a great architect, or even a good one. But he made the most of his limitations, and what we now see as his faults were to his loyal patrons his greatest assets.

Aftermath

By the time of Durang’s death, the historic core of Philadelphia had largely achieved its physical form. The great mills, breweries, and factories of the industrial city were in place, along with the sprawling neighborhoods of brick rowhouses that supported them. To ride the Market-Frankford Elevated Train was to see an endless three-story rowhouse horizon, interrupted only by the smokestack of the neighborhood factory and the sprinkling of church steeples that clustered about it. Invariably one or two were by Durang.

Though these churches were large, they were not rich; their fittings were of inexpensive wood and plaster, painted to look like stone. Durang seems not to have known the doctrine of truth in materials, or could not afford to indulge it. But a later generation, more prosperous and discriminating, came to find Durang’s churches uncouth. As they moved into Philadelphia’s growing suburbs and formed new parishes, they would engage more sophisticated architects, such as George I. Lovatt and Henry D. Dagit, Jr., to build more sophisticated churches. The result is that Philadelphia’s most advanced and artistically accomplished Catholic churches are not to be found in its historic core but in its surrounding ring of suburbs.

There are a few exceptions, of which the finest is the Church of Saint Patrick near Rittenhouse Square (1910-1913). It is a highly eclectic design by an equally eclectic pair of architects, Christopher Grant LaFarge and Benjamin Wistar Morris. LaFarge was an enthusiast for Byzantine and Romanesque architecture, which can be seen in the Episcopalian Cathedral of Saint John the Divine in New York, whose first phase he designed. Morris, who had worked on the New York Public Library, learned to love classical architecture as a student in Paris. Both sensibilities are visible in Saint Patrick’s, which is classical in its overall form but Byzantine in its color and vaulted construction.

The church was designed to be seen from the southwest corner of Rittenhouse Square, along extremely narrow Rittenhouse Street, so its forms needed to be big and simple. The solution was simplicity itself: a deep shadowy porch carried on robust granite columns, an elegant rose window on an otherwise blank wall, and the mighty gabled roof surmounting it all. In the bigness of its parts and grandeur of its expression, the church is thoroughly Roman – but the ornamental details are drawn freely from a variety of sources, including the early Renaissance of North Italy and the ancient Celtic art of Ireland, an appropriate source for a church serving a predominantly Irish parish.

So strongly does Saint Patrick’s differ from the churches of Durang—so violently, one might say—that one almost suspects that the architects were instructed to look at whatever he did and do the exact opposite. And they certainly did with respect to the plan and the treatment of materials. If a Durang church was simply an auditorium, LaFarge and Morris thought imaginatively about the nature of Catholic worship. The Catholic Mass comprises two parts: the Liturgy of the Word and the Liturgy of the Eucharist, each of which implies a different kind of architecture. One best hears the word in a centralizing space that brings people as close as possible to the speaker, but the rite of Communion suggests a processional space, in which people move forward toward the altar and the Sacrament. Saint Patrick’s ingeniously combines both. It consists of a single nave, rectangular in form and longitudinal in character, which widens as it approaches the altar to suggest a transept, giving it a cruciform shape. At the same time, the barrel vault atop the nave rises into a shallow dome, giving the crossing a spacious communal character, and forming the spatial climax of the church.

LaFarge and Morris’s vaults and dome were built in fireproof Guastavino tile, making it one of the most technologically sophisticated churches in Philadelphia. Three layers of tile, each less than an inch thick, were laid in a herringbone pattern in Portland cement, creating a ceiling that was strong, durable, and lightweight. LaFarge and Morris had the satisfaction of making a building that was “true” in every element, its forms and colors being generated by the materials themselves. For Catholic Philadelphia, most of whose churches were roofed in wood and plaster, this was a revolution.

Equally revolutionary was the color. Christopher Grant LaFarge was the son of John LaFarge, America’s great maker of stained glass, and he carried his father’s love of strong color into Saint Patrick’s. All the colors are sensitively chosen and intrinsic to the materials: the dark oak of the wooden pews, the red ceramic tile of the floor, the tawny brick walls. The stone of the chancel is almost musical in its harmony of colors: walls of delicate green Cipollino marble, golden Siena marble in the frieze above, and a high altar of brilliantly white Vermont marble.

You could hardly imagine a more definitive rejection of the architecture of E. F. Durang than Saint Patrick’s, and yet it sits companionably alongside two of his buildings, his rectory of 1860 and his school of 1882. You are free to admire the one and scoff at the others, but you should scoff charitably. For each of them responded to a distinct moment in the turbulent and complicated history of Catholic Philadelphia, and for that at least they deserve your respect and understanding.

This article is adapted from the keynote address given by Michael J. Lewis at Sacred Architecture Journal’s twenty-fifth anniversary celebration in Philadelphia on October 14, 2023.