» Church cross:
St. Michael’s alumni association carries it home
A stone cross that was removed from atop St. Michael's Catholic School on Milwaukee's north side will be returned for display on church grounds this spring.
A stone cross perched on the roof summoned generations of students to St. Michael’s Catholic School on Milwaukee’s north side, It remained up there for decades more after Urban Day School took over the building in 1972. Then, last year, it was gone. Its disappearance was not really a mystery. Penfield Montessori Academy bought the 94-year-old school building in 2016 and found that the supporting brickwork was in such poor condition that the cross was in danger of tumbling to the ground below.
“The cross was 4 or 5 feet high, limestone, probably pushing 1,000 pounds, and it’s sitting on a crumbling wall that’s like four feet above the roofline,” said Bryant Zimmermann, facility director for Penfield Children’s Center and the academy.
So it was removed with a crane in late summer.
Zimmermann contacted someone at St. Michael’s Church, which is attached to the school, to see if the parish wanted the cross. Penfield is now running a secular school there at 1441 N. 24th St., so it didn’t make sense to reinstall the cross on the roof.
The church expressed no interest in keeping the cross, Zimmermann said, so Penfield donated it to Habitat for Humanity ReStore, which accepts and then sells building materials, home furnishings and other items. Habitat sent over a truck and picked up the cross.
This is where Justin Frehlich picks up the story. He is president of the St. Michael’s Catholic School Alumni Association, which was formed 35 years ago and has a following of more than 900 grads. Enrollment at St. Michael’s had dropped to below 400 at the end in 1970, way down from more than 1,000 a decade earlier.
Frehlich, Class of ’68, was contacted by a woman who happened to be at the Habitat ReStore in Wauwatosa and spotted the familiar looking cross for sale.
“As curious as I am, I went out to the store and, sure and behold, it certainly looked like the cross that was located on top of the roofline foyer to the school’s entrance on 24th and Cherry,” he wrote in the November alumni newsletter. The price tag on the cross: $135. Frehlich drove to the school and verified that the trusty cross was indeed gone.
In his mind, the store should have waived the cost and just given the cross back to St. Michael’s. It’s a cross, after all. The manager didn’t see it that way.
“They insisted that all items donated must be purchased as intended by the giver,” Frehlich wrote. He would discover later that Penfield was the giver and that the cross was removed from the building as a hazard.
“Needless to say, we needed to get our cross back,” he said.
The decision was made to wait until one of the store’s 20%-off sales in October and buy the cross then. The store gave them an even better deal — $70.
“We love this story,” store manager Kris Hyndiuk told me Tuesday. “We were happy to be part of it, even though it might not be exactly how they wanted it to go.”
Frehlich had the cross loaded on his business trailer and then unloaded at the church with help from parishioners who showed up for Mass that day. He thinks it weighs closer to 500 pounds.
This spring, the plan is to mount the cross on a base and display it in a fenced area along the church’s Cherry St. side.
Frehlich credits parishioner Irene Senn with noticing the cross at the store and giving the alumni a chance to buy it back before someone else grabbed it for a lawn ornament.
“Our cross is home,” he said.