Marilyn Verna: ‘We Came Because We Were Poor’

Eye on Real Estate: Contemplating the future of Our Lady of Loreto

October 5, 2016 By Lore Croghan Brooklyn Daily Eagle

Dr. Marilyn Verna supports the adaptive reuse of Our Lady of Loreto as a community cultural center. Eagle photo by Lore Croghan

Share this:

Our Lady of Loreto was the immigrants’ Madonna. Her church was their refuge.

The now-closed church in the Ocean Hill section of Brownsville was a beacon of hope for Brooklyn’s new arrivals from Italy at the start of the 20th Century — a beacon they built for themselves.

“We came because we were poor,” said Dr. Marilyn Verna, a past president of the Italian Genealogical Group. “We had no food. There were diseases. The crops were dying.

“We expected the Catholic Church to take us in. It didn’t.”

Newcomers from Italy were discriminated against by other Catholic immigrants who had been in New York longer than they had.

“We were relegated to the basements of the Irish and German churches,”said Verna, a retired New York City public school teacher and retired associate tenured professor at St. Francis College in Brooklyn Heights.

Once Our Lady of Loreto opened in 1908, Italian immigrant worshippers weren’t stuck in basements anymore.

The stunning cast-stone church at 124 Sackman St. was designed by an Italian immigrant architect. The builder, sculptor, interior decorator and painter were Italian immigrants.

Though Verna’s family members weren’t parishioners of Our Lady of Loreto, its heritage resonates with her.

One of her grandfathers emigrated from Italy to New York in 1899, the other around 1902 to 1907 — right around the time the church was built.

Her father was born next to the Raymond Street jail in Downtown Brooklyn. An aside for readers who are confused by this street name: It was changed to Ashland Place.

In the 1940s, her family moved from Fort Greene to Gravesend, where she lived until recently. She now lives in Staten Island.

‘We hate to see the beauty lost’

Verna has been involved in efforts to save Our Lady of Loreto since around 2008, along with other Italian-Americans. Preserving the neoclassical Roman Renaissance-style church building is important to them.

“We hate to see the beauty lost,” she said.

“We’re not preservationists. We’re not art history majors,” she said. “This is us. It’s our history. It’s in our blood.”

While researching the church site in conveyance books kept in Brooklyn Borough Hall, she found property records indicating the land had belonged to the heirs of Pietro Cesare Alberti. The Venetian immigrant is considered the first Italian to settle in New Netherland.

Italian-Americans in the Brownsville Cultural Coalition are in the process of raising funds from Italian-American organizations around the tri-state area for Our Lady of Loreto’s renovation and makeover as a cultural center in hopes that Catholic Charities Brooklyn and Queens would allow it.

Brownsville community members would be the leaders of this hoped-for adaptive reuse project.

A subsidiary of Catholic Charities has a long-term lease on the church building and adjacent property. It has already built 64 units of low-income housing on the latter.