The church in the orchard
&TODAY YESTERDAY
The Roman Catholic Parish of St. Alfred of Rome grew out of a desire on the part of English-speaking communicants of St. Joseph’s chapel on Garnet Street to have their own church when, in 1951, the Polish speaking members of St. Joseph’s moved to their new “basement church” on Garnet Street (the beginning of today’s Our Lady of Perpetual Help).
After continuing to worship in the old St. Joseph’s for a time, permission was received, and money was raised, to allow the Englishspeaking members of the congregation to establish the Parish of St. Alfred of Rome on a 4.8-hectare site at the northeast corner of Vine and Carlton streets.
This new site was at that time not even in St. Catharines — until amalgamation in 1961, the northern boundary of the city was Carlton Street, and the area where the new parish church would be built was still quite rural.
That can be seen by looking at our old photo this week. Taken sometime during the spring of 1953, the snapshot shows the original woodframe St. Alfred church in the distance, set far back from both Vine and Carlton, surrounded by acres of fruit trees.
Opened for services at the end of November 1952, the building contained the church’s worship area at the west end, facing Vine Street, the church office behind it, and at the east end of the building were apartments for the parish priests. The church could hold 450 people at a time, at a time when the parish consisted of only some 40 families.
The parish experienced steady growth in the decades to come, as the city spread out beyond Carlton Street and housing developments supplanted the former orchards. The congregation grew, and its facilities grew — it operated several separate schools, including St. Joseph School on Facer Street, St. Alfred School on the church property, Canadian Martyrs on Scott Street and Assumption at the corner of Parnell Road and Niagara Street. By the end of the 1950s the parish had also constructed a parish sports centre.
By the mid-1960s the little wooden church from 1952 was much too small for a congregation that by then included 1,500 families, so in March 1966 construction began on a much larger, very modern successor to the original building. That new church, able to hold more than a thousand worshippers at a time, opened in May 1967.
After the opening of the new building the original church building became the Italian Catholic Centre, reflecting the importance of people of Italian descent in the parish. It remained the Italian Catholic Centre for almost four decades, until it was gutted by fire at the end of December 2005. After considerable discussion the parish eventually decided not to rebuild the Cultural Centre, so its former site remains vacant today, an empty space at the edge of the new church’s vast parking lot.
— Dennis Gannon is a member of the St. Catharines heritage advisory committee. He may be reached at gannond2002@yahoo.com.