Category: News
I went downtown to photograph Saint Patrick-Saint Anthony Catholic Church today as part of getting our walking tours and our neighborhood history websites up and running. Turns out this is a terrible time of the year to try to take a photo of this church, on the south side of the street! I did get an interesting effect, though, in particular on the portrait orientation – it almost looks like a halo around the church.
So why try to photograph this church in the first place? The story around Asylum Hill is that this church is the model for the Asylum Hill Congregational Church and that possibly the two churches were twins. Problem is, the church that would have been “twinned” with Asylum Hill Congregational Church burned down in 1875 and again in 1956. It was built back both times mostly according to the original design, but not quite. The current church resembles the original church only below the belfry.
Is there actually a case to be made for this Legend of the Hill? Not really. They are certainly stylistically related because they were designed by the same architect, Patrick Keely, and it seems likely that the Asylum Hill Congregational Society likely hired him based on his local reference, i.e., Saint Patrick-Saint Anthony Catholic Church, which Keely designed just over a decade before he worked on Asylum Hill Congregational Church.
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