This Former Church was Demolished in 1996

St. Boniface-St. Vincent Roman Catholic Church, Detroit Michigan

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The German immigration into Detroit, which began early in the 19^th century, had resulted in the formation of a German parish, St. Mary's, as early as 1841. St. Mary's was located on the east side of Detroit, in an area which grew to be the German commercial center for a time, and which is now known as the Greektown District. Expansion of the German community generally moved eastward along Gratiot Avenue, and to some extent that pattern continues today; the first division of St. Mary's was the establishment of St. Joseph's in 1855 at Gratiot and Orleans. Some Germans, however, did settle on the west side of Detroit, particularly along Michigan Avenue in a generally Irish area known as Corktown.

In 1869, the Germans on the west side petitioned Bishop Peter Paul Lefevre, and the bishop assigned Rev. John F. Friedland, pastor of St. Joseph's, to investigate the practicality of a new west-side German parish. As a result, a parish was established to serve the growing German population west of Third Street, and placed under the patronage of Boniface, Apostle of Germany; although he never served in the parish, Fr. Friedland was regarded as its founder. No date for the actual establishment of the parish is available, but it must have been before March 4^th, 1869, when Bishop Lefevre died. Fr. Anthony Kuhlmann, assistant to Friedland at St. Joseph's, was appointed pastor. Under his direction, the parish established a pattern followed by new Catholic parishes in Detroit to this day, that of building a combination school and church building, so that education could begin immediately. The new structure was dedicated October 10^th, 1869 and was located on the west side of 13^th Street (now Vermont) between Michigan Avenue and High Street (now the Fisher Freeway); it was demolished many years ago. In 1873, a rectory was built at the southwest corner of 12^th Street (now Rosa Parks Blvd.) and High; later enlarged, it was demolished after a major fire several years ago.

The needs of the school were served by lay teachers until November 1872, when the Sisters, Servants of the Immaculate Heart of Mary came to teach the 300 children; an existing house was purchased to house the nuns. The parish school closed a number of years ago, and the later school building, built in 1927 and located next to the rectory on 12^th Street, was demolished.

The parish grew slowly; it is said that by 1872 only 100 families were members, and few of those were well-to-do. Growth was steady, if unspectacular, however; by 1883 eight hundred families were registered at St. Boniface; most were German, but some were Poles, whose west-side parish, St. Casimir, had yet to be established.

Increasing numbers and prosperity led pastor Bernard J. Wermers, appointed to the parish in 1872, to build the present church, the only surviving building built for the parish. William Scott & Co. were hired as architects, and the building permit was no. 786, issued July 19^th, 1882 to Caspar Wuestewald, a bricklayer, for a building 62' by 140', costing $25,000. The cornerstone was laid in the presence of Detroit Bishop Caspar Henry Borgess by Bishop Toebbe of Covington, Kentucky on August 13^th, 1882, and the Church was dedicated August 19^th, 1883 by Bishop Borgess assisted by Bishop Joseph Rademacher of Nashville.

William Scott & Co. is the earliest form of an architectural firm which was to have considerable influence in Detroit. William Scott was born and trained in England, and emigrated to Canada in 1853, where he worked on the development of the Canadian railroads. William Scott himself appears to have been an engineer, not an architect. His sons John and Arthur both entered the architectural profession and moved with their father to Detroit in 1875 where the firm was established as William Scott & Co.; their earliest known commission was a bank in a florid French Second Empire style. In 1889, William retired, and the firm became John Scott & Co. The Scott family is perhaps best known for the Wayne County Building in downtown Detroit, but this was designed long after William's retirement. Not much critical writing has been done on the work of the early years of the firm when the father was likely dominant (John was 31 when St. Boniface was designed, Arthur apparently younger). But there is an element of the bizarre or unusual which appears, especially in the interior millwork of the Thomas Sprague House in Detroit (NR) and in the metal "tile-hung" exterior walls of the Sprague House and one other residential commission built under the William Scott name. The only existing buildings other than houses presently known by William Scott & Co. are St. Boniface and Engine House No. 11 of the Detroit Fire Department.

The parish developed the usual range of organizations, some of them typical of German ethnic Catholic churches. These included the Ladies Society, The St. Boniface Society for men, a chapter of the Knights of St. John together with a Cadette organization for single young men, the Young Ladies' Sodality, and chapters of the socially significant mutual benefit organizations, the Catholic Protective Society of Michigan, the Catholic Mutual Benefit Association, and the Ladies Mutual Benefit Association.

After payment of the parish debt, and under the pastorate of the parish's first American-born pastor, Rev. John M. Schreiber, the church was consecrated on October 5^th, 1890 by Bishop John Foley. Consecration of a church is a rare honor in the Catholic Church, often reserved for cathedrals. There are four consecrated churches in the Archdiocese of Detroit. Also in the 1890s, the parish celebrated its twenty-fifth anniversary and built a parish hall, dedicated in 1892 and now demolished.

As with all German-American institutions, St. Boniface was affected by the anti-German sentiments of World War I and World War II. German institutions found it necessary to de-emphasize their German character in response to the hatred of the "huns". Although German orientation revived between the wars, the second wave of anti-German sentiment in the 1930's and 1940's, combined with changing neighborhoods, caused many German-American churches to lose much of their ethnic character.

By the 1960's, St. Boniface had lost its German character, and was merged in 1967 with the nearby, formerly Irish, parish of St. Vincent; St. Vincent's Church was demolished. At about the same time the status of an ethnic German parish was replaced by that of a territorial parish. Today, the parish is ethnically diverse, but many of the parishioners are of Maltese extraction, the Maltese having begun to move into Corktown about the turn of the century.

The clearance of much of the land around St. Boniface for parking lots to serve Tiger Stadium, two blocks away, has given St. Boniface considerable visibility, as well as a source of income, the parish's vacant land is used for stadium parking as well. More important to the church's landmark status, however, was the construction of I-75, the Fisher Freeway; High Street, which ran along the north side of the church, has become the freeway service drive, and the church is now a prominent landmark for thousands of motorists passing on the Interstate system every day as well as the tens of thousands who come to Tiger Stadium for baseball.

The parish was closed in 1989, and the building was demolished in 1996.

Site Description

St. Boniface Church was built in 1882-1883 to designs of William Scott & Co. of Detroit. The church is of red brick and light stone in the coloristic Romanesque manner; it is generally rectangular in plan and covered with a steep gable roof. Not overly large, it achieves distinction through the complex massing of subsidiary elements and through its decorative detail. A frontal tower and spire provide the dominant element, which was even more so originally when the spire was much taller.

Located two blocks west of Tiger Stadium, and on the edge of the Fisher Freeway, the church provides a highly visible urban landmark, surrounded as it is by parking lots. The church faces generally west at the southeast corner of Vermont and the freeway service drive, and is almost at the lot line on those two sides. All directions given here are geographical, not liturgical.

The church is about 140' by 62' and has a foundation of smooth faced ashlar limestone; the walls above are of the local orange-red brick, painted brick red as was typical in Detroit, with contrasting trim in light-painted stone and some decorative red terra-cotta, now painted grey. The main roof is now black asphalt replacing patterned slate, which originally displayed the monogram "IHS" centered on the main slope; the roof of the tower is still covered in hexagonal slate. The original roof cresting has also disappeared. Wood is used for door and window frames.

The style is the Late Victorian Romanesque Revival; although contemporary accounts used the term "Norman", the coloristic effects of brick and stone clearly relate more to Italian examples and to Ruskin, in spite of the English origins of the architects, who may have habitually used "Norman" to mean Romanesque, anyway. Just two years later, in 1885, the new St. Mary's Church by Detroit architect Peter Dederichs, with its similar use of polychrome brick and stone, was described as "Pisan Romanesque". The shape of the building a relatively low side walls and a relatively high-pitched roof, fronted by a single tower, suggests German sources, and coloristic effects are not unknown in the German Romanesque (Maria Laach); still, the occasional intrusion of somewhat Moorish elements takes us back to Italy, and perhaps to Sicily specifically.

Basically rectangular in plan, the church is made geometrically complex by elements at both front and rear. The front of the church has a square tower, slightly recessed into the basic rectangle but lying mostly in front of it. This has the main entrance centered within brick piers which support a stone gable on sidewise corbels. The main entrance has double flush doors under a round-arched tympanum which contains a small round window flanked by foliate carving. Above is an arch with polychromatic voussoirs topped with a hoodmould; this is round-arched on its lower edge and pointed on its upper edge, suggesting a Moorish influence. Above that arch and below the gable is a round plaque with the monogram "IHS" in gilt on black. Above the gable is a row of blind arcading, which supports a square opening containing the wooden tracery of the rose window; this is flanked by tall shallow niches. A cornice tops the walls of this stage of the tower, and on the front side above the cornice is a gable containing a central niche flanked by blind arcading; the niche contains a statue of St. Boniface, installed in 1886.

Above the cornice, the upper stage of the tower is stepped back. The point of the first stage's front gable coincides with a stone course in the upper stage forming the bottom of a low band of blind arcading in brick; above this are two round-headed openings in each face of the tower, with a carved stone band around the tower at the level of the springing of the arches and hoodmould over the openings, which are filled with pierced and scalloped louvers. A cornice with a corbel table finishes the square portion of the upper tower; a steeply gabled wall dormer rises from the center of each face, containing a single round-arched opening with scalloped louvers. A complex geometry of roofs around the dormers provide a base for the short octagonal spire surmounted by a gilded lobed cross. The spire was originally much higher, contemporary sources giving a total height of 192 feet, but the spire was destroyed, supposedly by lightning, many years ago, and rebuilt lower. No date for the spire replacement has been found, but the hexagonal slate and the style of the lobed cross indicates that it probably was before 1900.

Flanking the tower and abutting the front wall of the nave are two entrance vestibules whose outer walls form three sides of an octagon. Facing front in each is an arch-topped window surmounted by a wall dormer in the shape of a gable containing a small round window; all the windows of the church are topped with polychromatic voussoirs with hoodmolds. The side entrances are in the angled corner walls, their round-headed arches surmounted like the central door by polychromatic voussoirs forming an arch half-round at the bottom and pointed at the top and edged with a hoodmould. Above each side door is a round-headed window with voussoirs, below which is a peculiar hoodmold above the arched hoodmould of the door below. These hoodmolds are in three straight sections, the central and horizontal one forming a sill to the window above it; the two side sections, angled downward to label stops, extend toward the sides of the doors. A ramp for the handicapped begins its ascent along the south wall of the nave, and serves the southern side door of the main facade.

The side walls of the nave are, as noted, relatively low. There are four bays divided by attached buttresses. Each bay contains a pair of tall round-arched windows, each with two lights below a quatrefoil. The windows have a continuous stone sill course and are topped with polychrome voussoirs and hoodmolds, and the stone blocks at the springing would form a string course if not interrupted by the buttresses. At the top of the wall is a molded red terra-cotta cornice, divided into alternating upward and downward-facing triangles, the upward facing containing pointed palm motifs, and the downward-facing containing leaf forms; this cornice also runs up the gable ends at the front of the church and around the transept, chancel and sacristy elements at the rear.

At the rear of the main rectangle a "transept" is applied to either side of the nave; these rather odd forms, which are not really transepts, extend only a little, and have corner buttresses; the ridges of their hip roofs lie only about halfway up the slope of the tall main roof. On the south, the "transept" has a small semicircular baptistery applied to its center, above which are two quatrefoil windows in round openings with polychrome voussoirs and stone sills. The north transept has a pair of windows like those of the nave. The rear of the nave has a jerkin head roof, flanked by two chimneys. Between the chimneys is the segmental apse, five sides of an octagon; the side and end walls of the apse are longer than the corner walls and each side wall has a pair of quatrefoil windows placed high. The apse is flanked by the one-story high sacristy spaces, each with an arched door on the rear, the side walls with two polychrome arched windows with common sill and springing courses. At the center rear, the sacristy walls coincide with the rear wall of a shallow rectangular extension to the central wall of the segmental apse, which rises to a gable over a round window.

The carved ornament on the exterior of the church combines with the somewhat eastern character of the entrance arches to confirm the Scotts' reputation for eccentric design at this period. The carvings exhibit influences of the aesthetic movement, the Neo-Grec, Eastlake and other styles; some of the carving is simply eccentric and some style-less in its naturalism. Even contemporary sources recognized the unusual level of eclecticism, using terms like "innovative for Detroit", "diversified forms of arches" and "a variety of styles."

Within, the space is much like a hall church. Nave arcades of broad, low, pointed arches are carried on clustered columns with carved capitals; these carry a pointed tunnel vault over the central nave and quadripartite vaults with bosses over the side aisles. A large organ gallery is in the rear, apparently much enlarged from its original state. The space under the balcony has in recent years been subdivided by a wall from the rest of the nave in order to provide a space for socialization in a parish now without other facilities. An organ of 1940 is in the gallery, with a portion of the facade of the 19^th Century organ attached to it. The "transepts" are in fact broad shallow extensions of the side wall of the east bays of the nave; although the "transept" bays are longer than the other bays of the nave, they achieve their greater length simply by lengthening that arch of the nave arcade, and the nave tunnel vault continues uninterrupted above. There is handsome wooden wainscotting to window sill level around the perimeter, with cusped arches supporting an upper band of quatrefoils, all over the underlying tongue-and-groove, which is visible in the arches and quatrefoils.

The sanctuary runs across the east side of the "transept" bays, with side altars in niches on the east walls on either side of the chancel arch of the apse, which contains the main altar; the wineglass pulpit with its cantilevered canopy, removed long ago, once stood to the left of the chancel arch, and was once balanced on the right by a statue of the Sacred Heart on a bracket below a bracketed canopy. Statues of Peter and Paul standing on wall brackets once flanked the main altar.

Much original furniture remains, and although the church has been adapted to the Vatican II liturgy the interior is still Victorian in character. The Romanesque Revival main altar with its reredos and statuary and the side aisle sections of the communion rail are still in place, and these along with the missing pulpit were attributed in contemporary sources to Anthony Osebald, a German-American maker of church furniture in Detroit. The center of the sanctuary has had the communion rail removed and the platform altered to accommodate a modern freestanding altar, a presidential chair, and a lectern; the center section of the communion rail is in storage in the collections of the Detroit Historical Museum. The side altars remain as do the original pews.

The main altar table is divided into three panels, the central one with a bas relief cross supported by foliate Ornament, and the two side panels with bas reliefs of grapes and wheat. The table supports a tall reredos; the tabernacle in the center of the gradines is surmounted by a columned and canopied platform intended to hold the altar cross, or a monstrance during the exposition of the Blessed Sacrament. This is flanked by paneling and plinths on which are four Corinthian columns dividing the upper reredos into three sections, each with a half-domed niche. In the center niche is the patron, St. Boniface; St. Elizabeth is on the left, and the original statue of St. Bernard on the right has been supplanted by a figure of Francis Xavier. Above Boniface, the reredos rises to surround the quatrefoil window of the rear wall of the apse, set below a decorated gable and containing stained glass showing a bust of Christ with the Alpha and Omega.

The north side altar, like the main altar, has a reredos divided into three niches which now contain a statue of Our Lady of Fatima in the center with small angels in the two side niches. The original statues in this reredos included the Virgin as Queen of Heaven, Ste. Anne, and a third, unidentified, saint. The southern side altar was once a rood, or crucifixion scene; this reredos now serves as a background for a statue of St. Joseph.

The fourteen stations of the cross on the side walls were installed to mark the twenty-fifth anniversary of the parish, and are from the Mayer'sche Hofkunstanstalt, Munich, usually called simply Mayer of Munich. Much of the statuary was likewise from Mayer, a major supplier of church furnishings in the nineteenth and early twentieth century. In the rear corners of the side aisles stand statues of St. Vincent de Paul and St. Patrick, moved here when St. Vincent's was merged into St. Boniface and demolished.

The chapel on the south wall, intended for a baptistery, early received a Pieta from Mayer of Munich; the statue has now been removed and the base is now used to support a tabernacle, since the chapel is now used for reservation of the Blessed Sacrament. The baptismal font is now in the south side aisle, a superb Romanesque-style piece of varicolored carved stone, supported on triple clustered columns and with cherub heads on the side of the circular bowl.

The windows of the nave are also by Mayer of Munich, and were installed beginning in 1906. They are a series depicting the life of Christ; the first three installed were the Nativity, Presentation, and Pentecost windows, the others following as donors gave the necessary funds; the Nativity window is signed. The original windows were by Friedrichs and Staffin of Detroit, and were presumably grisaille-type glass, which that firm made for many Detroit churches. Each of the Mayer windows contains two donors' names, one for the Mayer window and one for the window that preceded it. The windows are typical of the Mayer work of the time, with the scenes depicted in formal perspective across both lights of the opening. Above and below the scenes is delicate architectural filigree in colorless and silver stained glass. The quatrefoils above display Christian symbols centered in them. The series includes the eighteen windows of the nave and the two windows located in the side vestibules. Also by Mayer are a pair of small arched windows on the stairs leading to the gallery, showing St. Gregory and St. Cecilia; the four quatrefoil windows of the side walls of the chancel showing the evangelists; and the two quatrefoil windows of the south "transept" showing the heads of Christ crowned with thorns and the Sorrowful Mother. Several minor openings retain their Original Friedrichs and Staffin glass; the southern "baptistery" has geometric glass in the arts and crafts manner.

The church interior is now painted very simply in cream but one historic photograph shows an extensive painted decoration. One source cites William Hofstede of Detroit as the painter and the anniversary booklet of 1894 praises him highly although no other source identifies him as anything other than a simple workman. The "Von Machs" are also cited as the decorators, and M.E. Von Mach advertised as church and household decorators and painters located at 968 Michigan Avenue in that same anniversary booklet. One suspects, since Hofstede was noted as deceased in 1894, that Hofstede painted the church when new, and Von Mach did a later, more elaborate scheme, perhaps in time for the 25^th anniversary.

That same photo of the interior shows wooden floors with a runner of matting down the center aisle. The aisles are now early-twentieth-century mosaic tiles in geometric patterns and earth tones. The bracket lights shown on the columns in that photo are gone, and the church is now lighted by two large early twentieth-century chandeliers in the central nave, and cylindrical lanterns hung from the bosses of the side aisle vaults.