Saturday, August 20, 2016

Assembly Member wants historic Brooklyn church saved


From the Brooklyn Eagle:

On Tuesday, state Assemblymember Latrice Walker called on Brooklyn's Catholic hierarchy to withdraw its demolition application for a historic church in the Ocean Hill section of Brownsville, Our Lady of Loreto.

At a press conference outside the shuttered century-old church at 124 Sackman St., Walker (D-Brownsville) urged Catholic officials to work with the community and turn Our Lady of Loreto into a much-needed cultural center.

Assemblymember Latrice Walker, at the microphone, calls for a halt to Our Lady of Loreto's demolition.Assemblymember Latrice Walker, at the microphone, calls for a halt to Our Lady of Loreto's demolition.

“Partner with our neighborhood,” Walker said.

“Let's invest in the people in this community as well as its infrastructure.”

Last week, Catholic Charities Brooklyn and Queens CEO Msgr. Alfred LoPinto announced “there is no viable use for the structure” and it will be torn down “to provide housing for families in need.”

7 comments:

Anonymous said...

The Catholic Church is in need of a lot of money to settle priest pedophile lawsuits.
This site is worth gold to the church. Dwindling church attendance is also to blame.

ron s said...

""Last week, Catholic Charities Brooklyn and Queens CEO Msgr. Alfred LoPinto announced “there is no viable use for the structure” and it will be torn down “to provide housing for families in need.”"

Catholic Charities smells a big profit. They are no better than the rest of the money grubbing real-estaters. As usual, it is for a fake charitable reason--"families in need". What a crock.

Anonymous said...

This would make a perfect community center but it will not happen because its not under the party's thumb. Letting the public gather in unscripted places can be dangerous for official dogma.

The new cultural initiative by Queens based Finkelpearl wants the model of Queens for the rest of the city - a few machine connected cultural institutions providing a bland diet of politically acceptable programming (along with plenty of photo ops for carefully targeted audiences) - feeding from a bottomless trough of public monies while real community groups are starved for support.

It is one of the ways you keep communities weak.

Once again Brooklyn shows how there is no comparison with Queens. Can you imagine any public official bucking the system for a community in this boro?

Anonymous said...

Finkelpearl as Culture Czar designing a Master Plan for Culture? Sounds like the thing they do in Fascist or Totalitarian Regimes. Lets take a look at what is in store for us by the record Finkelpearl's Queens shows the world.

The major Queens Cultural Institutions are poorly run (think the crew on the Library Board),

are unfocused money pits (think of the decades long Bowne House renovations),

tiresome exercises in political pandering (think about all our multi-cultural festivals that have been following the same template for about 40 years),

political patronage positions (Mrs. Weprin from Louis Armstrong to the Director of Cultural Affairs and Tourism),

are poor at fund raising because of their inept leadership and stale offerings (which is why they suck up all the oxygen in the room for everyone else by laying claim to most of the borough's public moneys of culture),

and are all but inaccessible and lacking in image or focus (Finkelpearl's own Queens Museum).

Meanwhile places that could be a real use - from RKO Keiths to St Saviours to Steinway Mansion - are examples of the borough's legendary dysfunction rather than unique tourist destination.

No one in Manhattan takes the better part of the day to get to and to pose for pictures and dine in places with eye-rolling names as 'Diversity Plaza'.

This is the sorry-assed vision that Finkelpearl (and De Blaz) has for NYC.

Tired reruns on Broadway and Disney ditties may make lots of money pandering to tourists from Davenport and Dusseldorf and Broadway may have hordes of starry eyed kids coming here because opportunities in the rest of the country suck, but these trends are not sustainable.

Sooner or later they will come to an end, and NYC will resemble Imperial Rome, with hordes of the unwashed going to spectacles and a tiny disconnected elite hiding behind the walls of their towers.

Anonymous said...

We are living in a post Catholic era.
LOL!
How about turning it into a mosque.
That happened when Constantinople fell to the Turks and became Istanbul.

Anonymous said...

Those comments about Finkelpearl raise some serious issues that the NYC cultural scene should start to discuss. Look how the library was used as a secret meeting space pols to discuss those shelters.

Anonymous said...

Catholic Churches belong where there are Catholics. When the local Catholic population is replaced by non-Catholics, then you have a church that doesn't serve a purpose. If Italy becomes a majority atheist or Muslim country, which it is on track to do, they will be tearing down more churches than they already are doing.

If Latrice Walker has a competitive offer to make for the site to Msgr Alfred LoPinto, go ahead and make it.