The St. Stanislaus Bishop and Martyr Roman Catholic Church is a church located at 5818 Dubois Street in

Detroit Detroit ( , ; , ) is the largest city in the U.S. state of Michigan. It is also the largest U.S. city on the United States–Canada border, and the seat of government of Wayne County. The City of Detroit had a population of 639,111 at t ...

Michigan Michigan () is a state in the Great Lakes region of the upper Midwestern United States. With a population of nearly 10.12 million and an area of nearly , Michigan is the 10th-largest state by population, the 11th-largest by area, and t ...

. The church was listed on the

National Register of Historic Places The National Register of Historic Places (NRHP) is the United States federal government's official list of districts, sites, buildings, structures and objects deemed worthy of preservation for their historical significance or "great artistic ...

in 1989.

History

In 1898, the parish of St. Stanislaus was established to relieve the overcrowding in the Polish congregation of at St. Albertus. A church and school were purchased for the parish from the Protestant Bethel Church, and in 1900 a new elementary school was constructed. Reverend F. G. Zella was assigned as the first pastor. However, between 1905-1910 the population of the church doubled, and a new church was desperately needed. In 1911, work began on a magnificent

Baroque The Baroque (, ; ) is a style of architecture, music, dance, painting, sculpture, poetry, and other arts that flourished in Europe from the early 17th century until the 1750s. In the territories of the Spanish and Portuguese empires including ...

church with a lavish Beaux-Arts interior, which was completed in 1913. In 1921, a convent was built for the Felician Sisters who ran the school; seven years later, a high school was constructed. By the late 1940s, St. Stanislaus was the largest Polish

parish school A parochial school is a private primary or secondary school affiliated with a religious organization, and whose curriculum includes general religious education in addition to secular subjects, such as science, mathematics and language arts. The wo ...

in Michigan. After

World War II World War II or the Second World War, often abbreviated as WWII or WW2, was a world war that lasted from 1939 to 1945. It involved the World War II by country, vast majority of the world's countries—including all of the great power ...

, the demographics of the neighborhood changed as the Polish Catholics moved out of the city and into the suburbs; in addition, the construction of

Interstate 94 Interstate 94 (I-94) is an east–west Interstate Highway connecting the Great Lakes and northern Great Plains regions of the United States. Its western terminus is just east of Billings, Montana, at a junction with I-90; its eastern term ...

split the parish and displaced a number of families. Enrollment in the parish school declined, and the grade school was closed in 1968, the high school in 1973, and the convent demolished soon after. The parish underwent a resurgence in the late 1970s, but the 1989 reorganization of the

Archdiocese of Detroit The Archdiocese of Detroit ( la, Archidiœcesis Detroitensis) is a Latin Church ecclesiastical territory or archdiocese of the Catholic Church covering the Michigan counties of Lapeer, Macomb, Monroe, Oakland, St. Clair, and Wayne. It is ...

eliminated the parish. The Archdiocese sold the structure to University of Michigan organist Sam Koontz of Ann Arbor, MI in 1989. The congregation of Promise Land Missionary Baptist Church purchased the church from Koontz's estate in 1995, but lost it through foreclosure in September 2012. In January 2013, the church was for sale ''as-is'' for $79,000. It requires extensive work and several stained glass windows and other architectural elements had previously been removed. The school buildings house the Detroit Academy of Arts & Sciences and were not affected by the foreclosure and sale.

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Saint Stanislaus Bishop and Martyr Roman Catholic Church Churches on the National Register of Historic Places in Michigan Religious organizations established in 1898 Roman Catholic churches completed in 1913 Beaux-Arts architecture in Michigan Gothic Revival church buildings in Michigan Renaissance Revival architecture in Michigan Roman Catholic churches in Detroit Churches in the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Detroit Polish-American culture in Detroit National Register of Historic Places in Detroit 1898 establishments in Michigan 20th-century Roman Catholic church buildings in the United States

History

See also

References