The tallest building in Manhattan is One World Trade Center: one thousand seven hundred seventy-six feet, one hundred four stories. The tallest building in Brooklyn is the Brooklyn Tower: one thousand sixty-six feet, seventy-four stories. The tallest building in Queens is the Orchard: eight hundred twenty-three feet, sixty-nine stories. The tallest buildings in the Bronx are Harlem River Park Towers I and II: four hundred twenty-eight feet, forty-four stories. And the tallest building in Staten Island is the Old Church of Saint Joachim and Saint Anne: two hundred twenty-five feet, one story.
The church’s façade is imposing, with three stone staircases leading to three bright red double doors, statues of the eponymous grandparents of Christ looking down from above, and a steeple stretching higher than any other point on the island. It can be seen from miles off, rising high above the grasslands and forest surrounding the church, an area called Mount Loretto. It is a strange building: The roof of the church’s nave sits much lower than that of the façade. While the façade is clearly a product of the 1890s, the rest of the church is built in a modernist style of the 1960s, with abstract stained glass windows and a minimalist tabernacle built into a wall. To understand how this odd stylistic anomaly came to be, we must recount the church’s history.
In the 1860s, John Christopher Drumgoole was a sexton at Saint Mary’s on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. The church sheltered the neighborhood’s homeless children in its basement. Many were orphans, the children of Irish immigrants who had died during the Civil War or the Great Starvation. Drumgoole, an Irish immigrant himself who was studying for the priesthood, looked after them. He soon came to see their preservation, and, more than that, their salvation, as his life’s mission.
After his ordination in 1869, Drumgoole began his mission in earnest. He founded a newspaper, the Homeless Child and Messenger of St. Joseph’s Union, and through its sales was able to secure funds to build a mission house in the Bowery. The Mission of the Immaculate Virgin was established in 1871. It was well ventilated and had plenty of natural light. Still, Drumgoole came to believe that the city simply was not a healthy place for children to grow up and that somewhere with fresher air and green grass would be better. When he found a farm for sale on Staten Island whose countryside reminded him of his native County Longford, he raised the funds to buy it and began planning the construction of a new mission there. Drumgoole named it Mount Loretto, after friends of his from the Franciscan Sisters of the Immaculate Virgin. These sisters helped teach and raise the city’s street children with him.
Mount Loretto became a completely self-sufficient farm, capable of feeding nearly two thousand children together with a staff of clerics and laymen. Later, the staff built a power plant to support the operation. The grounds also included a school meant to teach the children how to be cobblers, bakers, carpenters, printers, and other kinds of tradesmen. Groundbreaking and a blessing of the site for a new church took place on September 8, 1887. Construction progressed quickly; several of the boys and girls at the site helped build the church by making the pews, the door, and most of the trim for the building.
Drumgoole didn’t live to see the church completed. He died just a few months after the groundbreaking because of a case of pneumonia that he developed during the Great Blizzard of 1888. He died debtless, having raised the funds for all his ventures himself, and beloved by New York’s street children.
Saints Joachim and Anne was finished and consecrated in 1891. In the following decades, the old church was a place of worship and gathering for the thousands of children and religious who passed through Mount Loretto’s halls. In 1971, Francis Ford Coppola filmed exterior shots of the church for the baptism scene in The Godfather. (The interior shots in the movie are of the Basilica of Saint Patrick’s Old Cathedral.)
That scene in The Godfather was one of the last times the old church would appear intact. On December 19, 1973, almost the entire church burned down in an accident. Only the façade and a few stone walls remained. Foul play was not suspected. In the following years, funds were raised and the church was rebuilt. There was a peculiarity, though. The new church was built on the foundation of the lower church beneath the main church. This is the reason for the church’s unusual shape and character, with the massive façade and vestibule from the old church in the front and the much smaller nave and transept in the modern style in the back. On October 17, 1976, the new church was finished and dedicated by Terence Cardinal Cooke, whose signed portrait still hangs in the vestibule. In the 1980s, the old church was nearly incorporated into a nearby parish, which had been a victim of arson. But that parish resolved to rebuild, and Saints Joachim and Anne was left on its own.
In 1995, Mount Loretto discontinued its foster care contracts with the state of New York, ending its services for orphans and homeless children who had been raised at the site. But its mission of feeding the hungry and educating children did not end there. These days, the church is not an active parish. It is mostly used for storage and sorting donations. Occasionally, on special days, it is restored to its former glory. One such day is the anniversary of the opening of Catholic Charities of Staten Island’s St. Edward Food Pantry, to which I was invited last year.
Before the Mass, I was given a tour by Jarrod Zinnanti, who before working for the church was a New York City police officer. He showed me around the vestibule, which now houses a small museum filled with framed photographs, paintings, and tapestries alongside glass cases displaying Bibles, busts, and other relics of the old church. The vestibule was in a state of disrepair, the lighting dim and the plaster flaking. A solitary ladder led up to the steeple. “Nobody likes going up there,” Zinnanti said, adding that even the workmen believe it to be unsafe.
A Mass of thanksgiving was celebrated in the church, which had been carefully cleaned and rehabilitated. The Mass was celebrated by Father Eric Rapaglia, with Father Evangelio Suaybaguio as co-celebrant and sisters from the Ministry of the Franciscan Handmaids of Mary and Mount Loretto’s numerous volunteers and benefactors in attendance.
Following the Mass, we proceeded to the food pantry behind the church. It was founded in 1952 by the Franciscan Sisters at St. Edward’s, a camp for children near their novitiate. When the novitiate closed in 2003, the camp moved to Mount Loretto and was blessed by Suaybaguio—hence his attendance at the day’s Mass. A Staten Island resident secured several shipping containers, which were moved to Mount Loretto and transformed into buildings for the food pantry. The buildings are clean, well lit, and well ventilated; when inside, one forgets one is in a shipping container. The food pantry works with the city, local parishes, and individual donors and volunteers.
Even though the orphans are gone, Mount Loretto still cares for children on its grounds. P.S. 25 South Richmond High School, one of the city’s special education schools, is located at Mount Loretto, and is attended by students from ages ten to twenty-one. P.S. 3 also has an annex on the grounds that serves as the school’s early childhood center. Mount Loretto has a basketball court, soccer and lacrosse fields, a youth center, a senior center, and a preschool.
Near this more recent construction is Mount Loretto’s cemetery. Many of the religious sisters are buried there; some who were assigned to Mount Loretto and later relocated leave instructions that they be interred in its cemetery. A few marble markers lie in the cemetery, but most of the graves have only modest wooden crosses. At the top of the hill sits the cemetery’s sole mausoleum, in which Drumgoole is buried.
A playground sits in front of the graveyard, with toys, scooters, and miniature cars strewn about. In 1902 a statue of Drumgoole was cast in Chicago. It now sits across a plaza from the doors of the old church, with Drumgoole eternally looking not at the church he designed, nor at the schools he built, nor at the land he bought, but at a pair of children he taught. One child clasps father’s vestment for protection, grasping for the Bible in the priest’s hand. The other child sits at his feet, engrossed in a book.
The tallest building in Manhattan is One World Trade Center: one thousand seven hundred seventy-six feet, one hundred four stories. The tallest building in Brooklyn is the Brooklyn Tower: one thousand sixty-six feet, seventy-four stories. The tallest building in Queens is the Orchard: eight hundred twenty-three feet, sixty-nine stories. The tallest buildings in the Bronx are Harlem River Park Towers I and II: four hundred twenty-eight feet, forty-four stories. And the tallest building in Staten Island is the Old Church of Saint Joachim and Saint Anne: two hundred twenty-five feet, one story.
The church’s façade is imposing, with three stone staircases leading to three bright red double doors, statues of the eponymous grandparents of Christ looking down from above, and a steeple stretching higher than any other point on the island. It can be seen from miles off, rising high above the grasslands and forest surrounding the church, an area called Mount Loretto. It is a strange building: The roof of the church’s nave sits much lower than that of the façade. While the façade is clearly a product of the 1890s, the rest of the church is built in a modernist style of the 1960s, with abstract stained glass windows and a minimalist tabernacle built into a wall. To understand how this odd stylistic anomaly came to be, we must recount the church’s history.
In the 1860s, John Christopher Drumgoole was a sexton at Saint Mary’s on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. The church sheltered the neighborhood’s homeless children in its basement. Many were orphans, the children of Irish immigrants who had died during the Civil War or the Great Starvation. Drumgoole, an Irish immigrant himself who was studying for the priesthood, looked after them. He soon came to see their preservation, and, more than that, their salvation, as his life’s mission.
After his ordination in 1869, Drumgoole began his mission in earnest. He founded a newspaper, the Homeless Child and Messenger of St. Joseph’s Union, and through its sales was able to secure funds to build a mission house in the Bowery. The Mission of the Immaculate Virgin was established in 1871. It was well ventilated and had plenty of natural light. Still, Drumgoole came to believe that the city simply was not a healthy place for children to grow up and that somewhere with fresher air and green grass would be better. When he found a farm for sale on Staten Island whose countryside reminded him of his native County Longford, he raised the funds to buy it and began planning the construction of a new mission there. Drumgoole named it Mount Loretto, after friends of his from the Franciscan Sisters of the Immaculate Virgin. These sisters helped teach and raise the city’s street children with him.
Mount Loretto became a completely self-sufficient farm, capable of feeding nearly two thousand children together with a staff of clerics and laymen. Later, the staff built a power plant to support the operation. The grounds also included a school meant to teach the children how to be cobblers, bakers, carpenters, printers, and other kinds of tradesmen. Groundbreaking and a blessing of the site for a new church took place on September 8, 1887. Construction progressed quickly; several of the boys and girls at the site helped build the church by making the pews, the door, and most of the trim for the building.
Drumgoole didn’t live to see the church completed. He died just a few months after the groundbreaking because of a case of pneumonia that he developed during the Great Blizzard of 1888. He died debtless, having raised the funds for all his ventures himself, and beloved by New York’s street children.
Saints Joachim and Anne was finished and consecrated in 1891. In the following decades, the old church was a place of worship and gathering for the thousands of children and religious who passed through Mount Loretto’s halls. In 1971, Francis Ford Coppola filmed exterior shots of the church for the baptism scene in The Godfather. (The interior shots in the movie are of the Basilica of Saint Patrick’s Old Cathedral.)
That scene in The Godfather was one of the last times the old church would appear intact. On December 19, 1973, almost the entire church burned down in an accident. Only the façade and a few stone walls remained. Foul play was not suspected. In the following years, funds were raised and the church was rebuilt. There was a peculiarity, though. The new church was built on the foundation of the lower church beneath the main church. This is the reason for the church’s unusual shape and character, with the massive façade and vestibule from the old church in the front and the much smaller nave and transept in the modern style in the back. On October 17, 1976, the new church was finished and dedicated by Terence Cardinal Cooke, whose signed portrait still hangs in the vestibule. In the 1980s, the old church was nearly incorporated into a nearby parish, which had been a victim of arson. But that parish resolved to rebuild, and Saints Joachim and Anne was left on its own.
In 1995, Mount Loretto discontinued its foster care contracts with the state of New York, ending its services for orphans and homeless children who had been raised at the site. But its mission of feeding the hungry and educating children did not end there. These days, the church is not an active parish. It is mostly used for storage and sorting donations. Occasionally, on special days, it is restored to its former glory. One such day is the anniversary of the opening of Catholic Charities of Staten Island’s St. Edward Food Pantry, to which I was invited last year.
Before the Mass, I was given a tour by Jarrod Zinnanti, who before working for the church was a New York City police officer. He showed me around the vestibule, which now houses a small museum filled with framed photographs, paintings, and tapestries alongside glass cases displaying Bibles, busts, and other relics of the old church. The vestibule was in a state of disrepair, the lighting dim and the plaster flaking. A solitary ladder led up to the steeple. “Nobody likes going up there,” Zinnanti said, adding that even the workmen believe it to be unsafe.
A Mass of thanksgiving was celebrated in the church, which had been carefully cleaned and rehabilitated. The Mass was celebrated by Father Eric Rapaglia, with Father Evangelio Suaybaguio as co-celebrant and sisters from the Ministry of the Franciscan Handmaids of Mary and Mount Loretto’s numerous volunteers and benefactors in attendance.
Following the Mass, we proceeded to the food pantry behind the church. It was founded in 1952 by the Franciscan Sisters at St. Edward’s, a camp for children near their novitiate. When the novitiate closed in 2003, the camp moved to Mount Loretto and was blessed by Suaybaguio—hence his attendance at the day’s Mass. A Staten Island resident secured several shipping containers, which were moved to Mount Loretto and transformed into buildings for the food pantry. The buildings are clean, well lit, and well ventilated; when inside, one forgets one is in a shipping container. The food pantry works with the city, local parishes, and individual donors and volunteers.
Even though the orphans are gone, Mount Loretto still cares for children on its grounds. P.S. 25 South Richmond High School, one of the city’s special education schools, is located at Mount Loretto, and is attended by students from ages ten to twenty-one. P.S. 3 also has an annex on the grounds that serves as the school’s early childhood center. Mount Loretto has a basketball court, soccer and lacrosse fields, a youth center, a senior center, and a preschool.
Near this more recent construction is Mount Loretto’s cemetery. Many of the religious sisters are buried there; some who were assigned to Mount Loretto and later relocated leave instructions that they be interred in its cemetery. A few marble markers lie in the cemetery, but most of the graves have only modest wooden crosses. At the top of the hill sits the cemetery’s sole mausoleum, in which Drumgoole is buried.
A playground sits in front of the graveyard, with toys, scooters, and miniature cars strewn about. In 1902 a statue of Drumgoole was cast in Chicago. It now sits across a plaza from the doors of the old church, with Drumgoole eternally looking not at the church he designed, nor at the schools he built, nor at the land he bought, but at a pair of children he taught. One child clasps father’s vestment for protection, grasping for the Bible in the priest’s hand. The other child sits at his feet, engrossed in a book.
