The Shrine & Parish Church of the Holy Innocents

The Church of the Holy Innocents was established in 1866 by Archbishop John McCloskey from portions of St. Stephen the Martyr, St. Michael's, Holy Cross, Cathedral and St. Columba's parishes. The first pastor, Father John Larkin (a native of County Galway, Ireland, via St. Michael's), purchased a small Protestant Episcopal frame church at the corner of Broadway and 37th Street in November 1866; the old name was retained and the building was converted into a Catholic chapel until a permanent church could be built. On June 20, 1869, the cornerstone of the present edifice was laid. Designed by Patrick C. Keely in the Gothic Revival style and constructed of Ohio and Belleville mixed stone, the 125-by-70-foot church seats 1,500 in the nave and three side galleries. It was built at a cost of $100,000 and dedicated on Sunday, February 13, 1870, with music provided by the Seventh Regiment Band. Father Larkin engaged the Italian-born painter Constantino Brumidi to create the monumental fresco over the main altar — shortly before Brumidi went on to immortalize himself with the Apotheosis of Washington in the U.S. Capitol Rotunda. In the early decades, cows still roamed the streets around 37th Street and Broadway. By the early 1900s, the neighborhood — first known as the "Tenderloin" — was dominated by immigrant tenements, the Herald newspaper, and theaters like the old Metropolitan Opera House, earning Holy Innocents the nickname "the actor's church." Playwright Eugene O'Neill was baptized at Holy Innocents in 1888. By 1910 the tenements were replaced by commercial towers; by the 1920s the area had become the Garment Center and Herald Square had turned into America's most famous shopping district, while Longacre Square became Times Square. Under the third pastor, Father Michael C. O'Farrell (appointed January 1894), the interior and exterior were renovated for $50,000, parishioners donated a new high altar and two Carrara marble side altars, a sanctuary railing, twenty stained-glass windows from Munich, and many paintings. Father O'Farrell also paid off the parish's $60,000 debt, and Archbishop Corrigan consecrated the church on February 12, 1901. In 1931, under the legendary Msgr. Aloysius C. Dineen — known as "The Padre of Broadway" — Holy Innocents became definitively a Parish, Shrine and Mission Church. Two famous devotional objects cemented the church's reputation: "The Return Crucifix" in the rear-right of the nave (called "the most touched and most kissed Crucifix in New York") and an unusual painting of Our Mother of Perpetual Help, the "Madonna of New York," transferred that year from St. Patrick's Cathedral. Mgr. Dineen welcomed a uniquely mixed congregation — shoppers, garment workers, theater people, executives — embodying the parish's motto: "While New York plays, we pray." In 2009 the parish began offering daily Mass according to the 1962 Missale Romanum in addition to the Ordinary Form, becoming the only parish church in the Archdiocese of New York with a daily Tridentine Mass. Between 2011 and a second phase of conservation, the Parma Conservation firm (with Elizabeth Kendall, Peter Schoenmann, and Cunningham-Adams Conservation) painstakingly removed layers of grime, varnish and over-paint to reveal the true vibrancy of the Brumidi Crucifixion fresco for a new generation.