East Williamsburg

Brooklyn, one building at a time.

Name: Most Holy Trinity Catholic Church
Address: 138 Montrose Avenue
Cross Streets: Manhattan and Graham Avenues
Neighborhood: East Williamsburg
Year Built: 1882-85
Architectural Style: French Neo-Gothic
Architect: William Schickel
Other works by architect: In Brooklyn – St. Thomas Aquinas, Park Slope, All Saints, nearby on Throop Ave. In Manhattan – Stuyvesant Polyclinic Hospital on 2nd Ave, Church of St. Ignatius Loyola, Park Ave, and others.
Landmarked: No

The story: I first time I saw the lead-clad spires of this church rising over East Williamsburg, I had to see what was underneath them. The design looked so modern and science fiction-like, a church clad in armor. Imagine my surprise to get much closer find a huge French Gothic church underneath! When built, Holy Trinity was one of the largest church buildings in either Brooklyn or Manhattan. The towers are 250 feet tall, and rise over a neighborhood that once, like the church itself, was almost exclusively German. The history of this church and parish is an interesting one, and even has ghosts!

The origins of this church lie in the Austrian Tirol Mountains, home to the church’s founder, John Stephen Raffeiner, a man who became a soldier, successful doctor, then at the age of 40, a priest. He immigrated to the US in 1833, and was one of the founders of Manhattan’s St. Nicholas parish, the oldest German Catholic parish in NYC. (more…)

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Brooklyn, one building at a time
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Name: All Saints Roman Catholic Church
Address: 115 Throop Avenue, at Thornton and Flushing
Neighborhood: East Williamsburg
Year Built: 1894
Architectural Style: Neo-Gothic
Architect: Schickel & Ditmars
Other buildings by architect: Church of St. Ignatius Loyola and the Church of St. Monica, on the Upper East Side, Church of the Ascension, Upper West Side
Landmarked: No

The story: There are quite a few Catholic churches, convents and schools in the Williamsburg/Bushwick/far Eastern Bedford Stuyvesant areas. That’s because so many of the thousands of Germans who immigrated to Brooklyn in the mid to late 1800′s were Catholic. These people worked in the breweries and other industries in the area, and needed places to worship that were close to work and home. All Saints was founded by German immigrants in 1867, but thirty years later, the expanding parish had outgrown the old church, and this one was begun in the same site. The church was formally dedicated in 1896. Over the years, as the breweries closed and German Americans moved to other neighborhoods, the church gained an Italian congregation. They were, in turn, were replaced by the current Hispanic parishioners, a great deal of them from Mexico.
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