As if I needed another reason to feel that NYC is the center of the universe-- now the Pope will be holding mass tonite at a church I attended on the Upper East side-- a half block away from a little studio I rented from John & Maria Reiser for 4 years from 1998-2002. The last time I went to that church (only 1 of a handful of times, I confess, and all of them holidays)- was for a full Easter Sunday mass with my mother in 2002. What I remember most about that day was not the striking beauty of the immense traditional church- and it is beautiful- but that my mother actually admitted that she was bored by the long mass and couldn't wait to get out into the fresh air. And now the first German pope in centuries will visit "one of the last places in the city's Roman Catholic archdiocese that still regularly offers Mass in German". The Reisers must be beside themselves!Here's more on this story from Fox News (..sorry, but it has the best coverage of this one particular event)
"...St. Joseph's Church, on Manhattan's Upper East Side, once was at the heart of German-American life in a city whose German-speaking community was as populous as Munich. The neighborhood, called Yorkville, has little left that's German. But the church and a small group of German Catholics remain.
St. Joseph's was founded in 1873 by the first of tens of thousands of German-Americans who for more than a century ran Yorkville's butcher shops, beer gardens, dance halls, restaurants and bookstores. By 1900, New York had more than 300,000 German residents and about 100,000 German-speaking Austrians among its 3.5 million people — about the population of large German cities like Munich and Leipzig.
Today, a short walk from the church, big steins of beer are still served with specialties like boiled pig knuckle, bratwurst and liverwurst at the Heidelberg Restaurant, a spot with dark wooden walls, decorated with deer antlers."
Happy spring!
-Carolyn
-Carolyn
0 comments:
Post a Comment