St. Monica's Church

About this property

St. Monica's Church is a historic former Roman Catholic parish church in the Diocese of Brooklyn, located in Jamaica, Queens, New York. It was built in 1856 and is a brick basilica-type building in the Romanesque style. It features a four-story entrance tower in the center of its three-bay-wide front façade. Saint Monica's Church has been refurbished on the Campus of York College as a child care center. St. Monica's Roman Catholic Church was constructed by master mason Anders Peterson under the direction of Reverend Anthony Farley. The Church is marked by its distinctive central campanile, which is reminiscent of the Romanesque architecture. This also made it one of the earliest surviving examples of Early Romanesque Revival architecture in New York, and one of the only Roman Catholic Churches in the city executed in this style. Father Anthony Farley arrived at St. Monica's in 1854 to begin his influential term as its pastor and to help with the plans for the construction of a new church on five lots of land on Washington Street (160th Street). Four such lots near the old frame church were given to the Church by a French woman from New York and Farley purchased the fifth. The cost for this church's construction was $25,000. Farley selected Jamaica master mason Anders Peterson, a Dane who also owned a local grist mill, as the contractor. Peterson was prominently familiar with the contemporary building history of the area and was responsible for the fine masonry of the First Reformed Church (1861-1863) and that of Grace Episcopal Church (1861-1863). The cornerstone of the building was laid in 1856 and on August 15, 1857, Bishop Loughlin, the first Bishop of Brooklyn, presided over the dedication of the church. St. Monica's Roman Catholic Church was designed as a red brick Romanesque Revival style building with a tall central campanile and an Italian flavor. The structure was given "an impression of height beyond its actual size" by slender pilasters outlining the brick. Most of the building's modest decoration was made so by the delicate brick situated on the top of the side walls. The inside of the church is a great open hall, which has been redecorated twice in a much higher style (during 1893 and the 1930s). It was constructed with no interior columns for support; the interior was made spacious and could seat 500 people. During the 1940s, Mario M. Cuomo was an altar boy for this church. St. Monica's Roman Catholic Church has been destroyed by vandalism and neglect. The church's leaded-glass windows were broken, the copper gutters were ripped off the roof, holes were chopped into the sides of the building, and all the inside pews were carried away. Additionally, St. Monica's Church was brought to ruin and neglect when one of Long Island's youngest colleges was built. It held a final Mass of thanksgiving before it closed its doors to make way for the growing multimillion-dollar York College expansion.

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Property data from the National Register of Historic Places, National Park Service (public domain).

Description adapted from Wikipedia under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

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