St. Matthias Roman Catholic Church

58-15 Catalpa Avenue | Ridgewood | built 1910

Open on the map4 entries

The lot about 1940
About 1940. Via 1940s.nyc
The lot about 1985
About 1985. Via 80s.nyc

The city photographed every building for its tax records around 1940 and again in the 1980s. NYC Municipal Archives.

Written with AI from the source each entry cites, then fact-checked.

  1. 1908

    Father Nicholas Wagner founds the St. Matthias parish with a census of Ridgewood's Catholics

    In 1908 Bishop Charles E. McDonnell named Father Nicholas M. Wagner, a Brooklyn native with German-immigrant parents who had studied at a seminary in Germany, as founding pastor of St. Matthias. McDonnell hoped to give each of the twelve apostles a church in the Diocese of Brooklyn, and this was the first Brooklyn Catholic church named for St. Matthias. Wagner began by counting the Catholics living around Ridgewood; the roughly 1,500 he found made up the new parish, which said its first mass in an open-air pavilion at Ridgewood Park and Colosseum.

    “Father Wagner's first undertaking as pastor of St. Matthias was to conduct a census of the Ridgewood area; the approximately 1,500 Catholic residents counted…”

    Source: NYC Landmarks Preservation Commission

  2. 1919

    A one-story basement church opens on the site after wartime costs halt the building campaign

    As the parish outgrew its first combined church and school, it began a campaign for a larger church in 1917, but wartime shortages and high prices for materials and labor forced it to stop. Father Wagner instead planned a temporary church that could later serve as the base of the permanent one. This plain one-story brick building, set between the convent and the rectory and known as the basement church, was finished in 1919.

    Source: NYC Landmarks Preservation Commission

  3. 1926

    Working-class parishioners pay for the new St. Matthias Church, dedicated in 1926

    By 1924 the parish had collected enough of the expected $250,000 cost to begin construction, mostly through gifts of $200 or less from its working-class families. Designed by Francis J. Berlenbach, Jr., with Henry Schlachter as contractor, the new church was dedicated in 1926. It has a cruciform plan and a clock-faced bell tower over the narthex, and its pale-yellow brick, modest scale and Classical ornament match the older parish buildings.

    “By 1924, the parish had raised enough of the projected $250,000 cost to begin construction on the new church; ... largely through donations of $200 or less…”

    Source: NYC Landmarks Preservation Commission

  4. 2010

    St. Matthias still offers masses in five languages as newcomers join a once-German parish

    The parish stayed mostly German-American well into the 20th century, until immigrants from Poland and Latin America moved into the area and joined it. The Landmarks Preservation Commission's 2010 report on the Ridgewood South Historic District noted that masses were still said in German, along with Polish, English, Spanish and Italian.

    “Today masses are still offered in German, as well as in Polish, English, Spanish and Italian.”

    Source: NYC Landmarks Preservation Commission

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