St. Joseph’s Separate School
The first separate school in northeast St. Catharines was St. Joseph’s School, built in the mid-1870s adjacent to St. Joseph’s Church, in a triangle of land bounded by Garnet, Currie and Niagara streets – the area now called Sir Casimir Gzowski Park. The church and school were intended to serve the spiritual and educational needs of the families of the Irish workers then constructing the new Third Welland Canal nearby as it cut across North St. Catharines, heading for Port Dalhousie.
Both the parish church and the school were inactive by the end of the 1880s — work on the nearby Canal was completed and the workers had left to seek employment elsewhere.
The next separate school to serve that part of the city did not open until 1930, responding to a surge in population in the Facer Street district, many of them Polish and Italian immigrants constructing the Fourth Welland Canal and working in local factories. That school too was named after St. Joseph — and was also staffed by the Sisters of St. Joseph, a Catholic religious order responsible for Catholic education at numerous sites in the city.
The school building, shown in our old photo this week, was built by Newman Brothers and designed by the premier local architectural firm of that time, Nicholson and Macbeth, a firm simultaneously working on the Queen Street YMCA, the Leonard Hotel, and distinguished residences on Yates Street and in Glen Ridge.
The front of the new school was surmounted by a cross. Above the entrance was a date stone marked 1929 and a colourful, semi-circular mosaic panel depicting Christ flanked by two angels, along with the words of Christ from the Gospels — “Suffer the little children to come unto me.”
The school, opened in 1930, was soon filled to capacity. An addition was constructed behind the building in 1952, another next to it later in the 1950s. By then the school had 10 classrooms and a student body of over 430.
However, in succeeding decades the area school population slowly diminished, and by the early-1980s St. Joseph’s was a candidate for closure. The decision to close the aging structure was finally made in 1997. Its remaining 109 students would move to two other nearby Catholic schools, St. Alfred’s and Canadian Martyrs.
St. Joseph’s Catholic School closed its doors in June 1997. The building stood vacant until it was finally demolished in NovemberDecember 2001.
If today you go to the block of Facer Street between Augusta and Ormonde you’ll see that the school’s former site is occupied by a row of new houses along Ormonde and by a parking lot along Augusta. The only hint the school was ever there is St. Joseph’s Bakery and Delicatessen, named after the school and located across Augusta from where its namesake used to stand.