Robert Mortali remembers serving as an altar boy in Sacred Heart Church in the Hill. Now he’s praying the historic building doesn’t get torn down.
He’s not the only one expressing concern and anxiety for the fate of Sacred Heart Church in the Hill and its three outlying buildings, all of which date from the 19th century.
The neighborhood church and architectural icon has anchored the area since it was built as a Congregational church in 1851. In 1875 it became a Roman Catholic church. In recent years the largely Latino congregation struggled to maintain the old structure.
In the spring, over the objections of Sacred Heart parishioners, that congregation was merged with St. Anthony’s several blocks away. That complicated congregational marriage, between relatively poor and local Latino worshippers and St. Anthony’s largely suburban Italian parishioners, is being worked out. (Click here to read Mary O’Leary’s story in the Register, from the spring.)
In the meantime, the empty building’s owner, the Archdiocese of Hartford, is pondering the fate of Sacred Heart.
To sell or not to sell?
If it decides to sell: to a party committed to adaptive reuse, or not?
And what to preserve or not to preserve, in an Italianate stone church with spectacular stained glass windows?
Robert Mortali, Jr. (pictured with his father and grandfather) was an altar boy at Sacred Heart for four years in the 1960s. He has a clear opinion on the matter.
“It’d be a crime to tear it down,” he said at a recent Marchegian Club dinner. He recalled vivid memories of studying and serving in the church. “I’d like to see the building preserved,” he said.
Decisions to preserve or even to sell have not yet been made, according to Father John Gatzak, a spokesman for the Archdiocese of Hartford. After rancorous backing-and-forthing with the community, it shuttered up the church and surrounding buildings in mid September.
“The archdiocese is studying the property to make a determination as to what to do with it. The historic significance of the building, all that will be taken into consideration,” reported Gatzak in a phone interview. He would not comment on a time frame.
In other words, no decision has even yet been made as to whether to sell or not to sell. There is no for sale sign standing by the large stone Celtic cross. The archdiocese’s real estate agent Arnold Grant is receiving calls from interested parties, nevertheless.
“People are calling based on media reports,” Grant said. “It’s not for sale at the moment. If people call, I take their info.”
That the church is not going to be sold would come as a profound surprise to Mark Colville. He and his wife were members of the parish council before it was dissolved this summer, shortly before the plywooding of the church.
He described the closing of the church and its merging with St. Anthony’s as a mercenary operation on behalf of the archdiocese that had little to do with Christian values. Colville is active with the Amistad Catholic Worker House in the neighborhood.
“The justification they used for [closing] Sacred Heart was a bogus one,” he said, “that it was structurally unsound.”
The archdiocese’s contractors put a pricetag on the repairs well over $4 million. Colville and others went to Greg Farmer and the Connecticut Trust for Historic Preservation for a second opinion.
That came in, according to Farmer, at a few hundred thousand dollars. Click here to read Farmer’s report.
“That was blown off by the archdiocese [because] their decision was already made,” said Colville.
Not even Jay Bowes, who runs the St. Martin de Porres Nativity school in one of the additional three buildings of the Sacred Heart compound, knows what’s happening. “The archdiocese owns the property and we do not at this time have any knowledge of the future plans,” he said.
Colville is skeptical. He said he thought the archdiocese already had a buyer lined up. “I’d be shocked if it was anybody but Yale,” he said. “Yale is eating the neighborhood.”
However, Yale’s Vice President for New Haven and State Affairs Michael Morand said this, by email: “Our only interests are that the merged Sacred Heart/St. Anthony Church thrive together and that whoever (not us) might end up owning and/or using the former Sacred Heart Church property do so in a productive and positive way.”
City Hall economic development chief Kelly Murphy did not return calls for comment. The church lies smack dab in the middle of the Rte. 34 corridor area, whose re-design as a living neighborhood is part of the city’s future master plans.
Colville is waiting for the other real estate shoe to fall. Whatever it may be, damage has been done, he said. “They’ve dealt a serious blow to the local church here and are getting away with it. The church was a bastion of the Trowbridge neighborhood. Community organizing that got rid of drugs started at the church.”
“There are community people so outraged here, they would like to take over the church,” Colville claimed. “And not even people of faith.”
Robert Mortali was not at the point of civil disobedience, but of memory. He attended the last mass in the church before it was boarded up in mid-September. He said he remembered during his service as an altar boy waving at his great-grandmother in her nearby pew.