March 20, 2005

When the Bell Tolls

N a cold afternoon in February, Peter Cruz drove 40 minutes from Hempstead, Long Island, to the East Village, parked on Avenue B near East Seventh Street, and walked to the steps of St. Brigid's Roman Catholic Church, which has presided over Tompkins Square Park since 1848.

Mr. Cruz, 55, knew the stretch of sidewalk well. He grew up in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, but a blind date with a quiet Lower East Side girl named Rosalie drew him to the neighborhood for good. The couple married in 1973, and stayed in the area until 1991. Even after that, every Sunday they drove to St. Brigid's for Mass, where Mr. Cruz served as a head usher.

On this day, the metal gates in front of the church's steps were locked, and Mr. Cruz waited on the sidewalk in front of the yellow stucco building. After a few minutes, a man leaving the building held a side door open, and Mr. Cruz ducked inside. Hurrying down a hallway, he whispered to a visitor, "I haven't been here since September."

Turning into the church, he stopped short. Amid mounds of crumbled plaster, workmen in surgical masks were systematically detaching rows of pews from the floor. Tools and wires were everywhere. A man directing activity near the altar approached Mr. Cruz.

"Who let you in here?" the man asked.

"I just need to take some pictures," Mr. Cruz replied, fumbling with a Polaroid camera and quickly taking a few snapshots.

"Why do you need these pictures?"

"Memories," Mr. Cruz said, backing away toward the door. "Memories."

Pictures and memories are all that most parishioners have left of St. Brigid's, among the oldest Roman Catholic church buildings in New York. The church's main building closed its doors in 2001 because of structural problems, and the final Mass, in the basement of the Catholic school next door, was held last September. All that is left is for the structure itself to come down.

Yet the loss of St. Brigid's will be felt by more than its 200-some parishioners. A church is not an ordinary building. It is often an aesthetic treasure, touched with historic details like stained-glass windows and heavy, inlaid doors, portals for the chords of organ music to spill onto the street. It serves as a beacon on dark nights, a repository of local history, a surveyor of mundane and special events in a neighborhood's daily life. The end of a church, then, is an extraordinary event, even for those who may never hear a sermon, say a prayer or even set foot inside.

"These buildings are often the most beautiful in an area," said Peg Breen, president of the New York Landmarks Conservancy, a private group that still hopes to preserve St. Brigid's, along with several other New York churches. "They give you a sense of the flow of history, of architecture."

She added, "In a sense, you're pulling the heart out of these neighborhoods."

The Queens-born novelist Mary Gordon, who teaches at Barnard College, has vivid memories of the way her local church occupied a central place in neighborhood life, as the site of rituals like Communion and Confirmation, as well as Girl Scout meetings, basketball practices and teenage dances.

"It was both the physical and social locus, and it was very cohesive for the community," she said. "It kind of sacralized the everyday, and it made the sacred accessible and normalized."

But in recent decades, as the population of priests has shrunk, that connection has frayed, and the consequences have been dire. "To cut that tie of localness is a great blow to both people's religious and social lives," Ms. Gordon said, "because it destroys the conduit between the sacred and the ordinary."

At St. Brigid's, neighborhood protests and a fund-raising drive aimed at reopening the church proved fruitless. And so the story of St. Brigid's closing will most likely foreshadow what may happen to other churches in the Archdiocese of New York - which comprises Manhattan, Staten Island, the Bronx and seven suburban New York counties - as it undertakes a sweeping reorganization aimed at cutting costs and adapting to a shrinking corps of priests and a shifting Catholic population. Although the closing of St. Brigid's was not part of the formal realignment process, a spokesman for the archdiocese, Joseph Zwilling, said it involved many of the same issues.

What will become of the land St. Brigid's occupies is unclear. The widely held assumption in the neighborhood, however, is that the property will be sold or leased to a developer, who will build something tall and expensive. Mr. Zwilling would say only that several proposals were being considered, but added that whichever one won out, the church would have to be demolished. "I think that will have to happen no matter what," Mr. Zwilling said. "It's an unsafe structure, and efforts to repair it in the past have failed."

For one thing, a large, persistent crack near the building's northeast corner had destabilized its rear wall. The crack was repaired in the 1980's, but diocesan officials determined a decade later that the repair had not held. Last year, the Trinitarian Order, which provided priests for the church, decided to move its members out of the parish in the face of fiscal belt-tightening and a continuing personnel shortage. Faced with a damaged building and a dearth of priests, Mr. Zwilling said, the archdiocese had no choice but to close the church.

The Herald With Two Towers

Sitting with a cup of tea in his sprawling apartment across East Eighth Street from St. Brigid's, Roland Legiardi-Laura gazed out his window at the church's three arched front windows, framed by two towers that decades earlier served as the base for skyward-reaching steeples. Mr. Legiardi-Laura, a high school writing teacher and documentary filmmaker who has lived in the building since 1978, describes himself as no fan of organized religion, but every morning when he stands by that window and thinks through his day, it is St. Brigid's he sees.

"You develop an emotional relationship to people, and to buildings," he said as the music of Bob Dylan played in the background. "It's like an old friend."

Mr. Legiardi-Laura, an effusive man with unruly dark hair and a goatee, has found that the church tells him dozens of little things about the neighborhood. If there is a religious parade or procession, it starts there. If there is a red-tailed hawk in the park, the behavior of the pigeons that usually line the church's roof is a dead giveaway. There are constants, too; at night when the lights are on, there is a warm reflection through the stained glass, and during the day it is the kind of building where people passing by always stop to chat.

During his early years in the neighborhood, when Tompkins Square Park was notorious for riots and colonies of homeless people, Mr. Legiardi-Laura counted the church's presence as a blessing.

"If a few hundred people are somehow given a moment of peace and support, the neighborhood lives a better life," he said. "How many freaked-out people who were going to do something that they regretted calmed down in that building? I don't know."

He has never seen anyone beaten or robbed in front of the church, he said. "Criminals, if they have any moral sense, are intimidated by that. I've seen drug dealers walk by and cross themselves."

The Rev. George Kuhn, who was pastor of St. Brigid's from 1986 to 1995, is well acquainted with the neighborhood's rough side. During his time there, he opened a homeless shelter in the church's basement, and on one Holy Thursday he led parishioners in washing the feet of the homeless.

In 1988, when 50 people were injured in the park during what turned into a violent clash between demonstrators and police officers, the church held community meetings in its basement cafeteria. A year later, when the police dismantled a tent city in the park and rousted the homeless people who had been living there, Father Kuhn led parishioners in support of them.

A contingent from the church marched to an abandoned school on East Fourth Street, to take food to protesters and homeless people who were holed up there. As they drew close, officers told the church leaders they were under orders to arrest anyone who crossed police lines. Within the parish, Father Kuhn's response is legendary:

"I said, 'I'm working under orders, too. The order I have is to feed the hungry, and that comes from a higher authority.' "

The food was delivered, and the priest was arrested.

In the years since Father Kuhn left the parish, he has received updates from people like Mr. Cruz, and he sees a lot of things he does not like, notably a widening divide between rich and poor. His thoughts on the closing of St. Brigid's, then, may come as a surprise. In the Gospel of John, he notes, Jesus tells a Samaritan woman, "The hour is coming when you will neither on this mountain, nor in Jerusalem, worship the Father." In other words, true worship is not grounded in any earthly place.

"Here's Jesus saying this 2,000 years ago, that the place is not significant, it's the heart," Father Kuhn said. "That's a very important part of our theology. It's part of our humanity, and I would say personally our fallen humanity, that we find comfort in the familiar."

But he understands the bruised feelings of people who want to keep their church. "I don't mean to deny human attachments," he said. "There's a lot of disappointment, and people did a lot of work."

He hopes that any dismantling will be handled with sensitivity. "At the least out of respect for the people," he said, "but more than that, I would say out of respect for the holy place that this was."

This Earthly Place

In recent weeks, signs posted on telephone poles all around Tompkins Square Park have warned of sidewalk closings and parking disruptions for the filming of a movie version of the musical "Rent." The East Village depicted in the musical, which is about a group of young bohemians living rough lives in the early 90's, still hovers over the neighborhood like an unsettled ghost, drawing the double-decker tour buses that regularly circle the park.

Now, of course, the reality is more complex. On a recent Sunday afternoon, people lined up for brunch at the cafes fringing the park, and toddlers raced around playgrounds with brightly colored monkey bars. In one corner, parents pushed strollers; in another, a farmers' market was in full swing; and in a third, two young men leaned back on a bench and smoked a joint without a glance at the people walking by.

At the head of the park, St. Brigid's was quiet, although this was not how Peter Cruz remembered it; people used to hang around for hours after Sunday Mass. On this Sunday, he wandered around the park, stopping to greet people. At East Seventh Street and Avenue B, he found Trinidad Rivera, a rail-thin, gray-haired woman who used to sleep on a cot in the church's homeless shelter until friends helped her get her life together and persuaded her to become a parishioner.

Mr. Cruz spoke to her in Spanish, then interpreted her reply: "She said: 'I don't read or write, but I miss the church. I was going to be baptized here, but the day before I was supposed to be baptized, they closed the church.' "

Another former parishioner, Rosanna Castro, was walking through the park with her son, Steven, 14. Ms. Castro had tried a few other churches, and now attends Our Lady of Sorrows, on Stanton Street near Pitt Street. But her affection for her old church has not changed. "This morning I woke up and I was telling him, 'I miss St. Brigid's so much,' " Ms. Castro said of a conversation with her son. "I was just telling him, I wonder when they're going to knock it down."

After circling the park, Mr. Cruz stood in front of the church, where he encountered Ed Torres and Maria Tornin, two longtime parishioners. They were joined by Carolyn Ratcliffe, who lives around the corner on East Ninth Street. She is an Episcopalian, but she used to attend Mass at St. Brigid's because the church reminded her of a church in her hometown, Natchez, Miss. She still walks her dogs past St. Brigid's every day, and when she sees it from a distance, she knows she is almost home.

Because of the icy wind, the little group walked to the basement office of Rosie Mendez, a neighborhood activist who is running for City Council, and shared their memories of a place that had been threaded through their lives in so many different and sometimes subtle ways. "We kind of took St. Brigid's for granted," Mr. Torres said. "We've always had this expectation that the church would be reopened."

Can St. Brigid's Be Saved?

Mr. Torres has been working with the archdiocese finance office to determine what became of the $103,000 the parishioners raised for repairs. Mr. Zwilling, of the archdiocese, said diocesan officials had not been aware of the fund-raising drive and would not have sanctioned it, though parishioners said they believed they had church permission.

The former Trinitarian pastor of St. Brigid's, the Rev. Michael Conway, said about $30,000 was spent studying the possibility of repairing the church and making the social hall more suitable for Mass, but most of the money was still in the church's bank account when he left. Mr. Zwilling said the archdiocese was still going through the parish records and talking with parishioners to figure out what happened to the rest. "There seems to have been a problem sorting out the money that came in, and what amount, and where it went," he said. "The issue now is going through what records exist."

Still, Mr. Torres said he had made it clear to the archdiocese that the main goal, even ahead of recovering the money, was reopening the church.

There was talk in the room of hiring a lawyer, of getting a restraining order to prevent further gutting of the building. They remembered the Sunday last fall when a bishop arrived at the church and announced that St. Brigid's would be closed. And they remembered the tearful day a month later when the church held its last Mass.

"People were there with their children and their children's children, and they were all baptized in that church," Ms. Mendez said. "People were crying because their next great-grandchild will not be baptized in that church, and they knew that."

As the meeting wound down, the old St. Brigid's parishioners, together again, rose and climbed the stairs to go their separate ways. Exchanging handshakes and hugs, they stepped out into the cold Sunday air.