Utica Catholic Academy

[dave]

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On the left in this photo is where UCA stood for 125 years until torn down after 1960. Oh-Mary-We-Crown-Thee-With-Flowers-Today still stands guard on the grass, no doubt warding off the devil as he tried to bring his bag of wares to our school. Valiantly she (tried to) cast him out, he with his dance of abandon called the Twist, hip-swishing Elvis types, hemlines above the knee and Going Steady.

As I point out in my story,Irish Catholic Sex, "... 'going steady' was practically forbidden. Despite the proscription, boys and girls together did what you know they did and to signify their steady status a girl wore her boyfriend’s class ring suspended on a fine chain about the neck outside of her uniform, but only after school hours. During classes it was worn under the blouse against the skin so as not to attract the attention of the nuns."
www.windsweptpress.com/cathsex.pdf

Not that we didn't need Mary as benefactor, but Sister Majestyeria showed us how to pray when we might find ourselves in the throes of temptation. (Rap your knuckles on your chest like this: THUD! (Say Jesus.) THUD! (Say Mary.) THUD! (and Joseph!)

My friend Hank would overdo it, one time knocking himself over backwards while he stood praying in line under the fire escape on Burnett Street during a fire drill. The rest of us boys were looking up with interest as the girls in their wide uniform skirts came down the open iron stairs.

This was the same Hank who did a great rendition of an effeminate character he named Father Turquorius who would speak at length about praying for the canonization of someone he called Blessed Styffie of Glen Cove. And come to think of it, the same Hank who came up with the Mother Cabrini Award, given to the girl in our homeroom who had not aroused a single impure thought all year.

By the way, in the photo you can see the Utica Observer Dispatch building in the background on the right. It's fairly close to St. Johns, which is the reason we could feel and hear the presses roll up to speed in the old school building, as I point out in another story, Pride. "The next day I sat in math class up the street in an old brick high school building with roots down to the sub strata of rock. My soles could just feel the vibration of the presses start up for the Valley Edition at 10:30 in the morning. I felt exactly like the person Al told me I wasn’t, a bum."
www.windsweptpress.com/pride.pdf

[Clipper]

Are the sisters of charity the nuns that we used to see downtown with the large wing like head wear? Utica used to have a broad assortment of nuns back in the day when nuns still wore traditional habits by which you could determine what order they were affiliated with. I remember habits of black, brown and blue, as well as different types of head adornments. Now it seems that nuns dress in regular street clothes, and some wear a small veil and some don't. It's a tradition that is sad to see fade into the past.

Having as many Catholic schools and churches in the city, made nuns a common sight on the sidewalks and in the stores of downtown Utica. It is hard not to feel a certain sadness knowing that some of those churches are closed, most of the schools are closed, and downtown is no longer the wonderful place to simply go and walk around or grab a slice of pizza and a coke from the kiosk at Woolworth's, or a box of Karmel Korn.

[dave]

Yes, UCA's Sister's of Charity lived up the hill from St. John's, on Park Ave. or Mary Street, I believe. I was there once. I think it may have been the original house Devereux arranged for them when the order was first called to Utica.

And Charities were also at Lourdes in South Utica. Both groups would travel downtown for shopping when necessary, so it wasn't unusual to see them in stores and on the streets.

The "flying nun hat" is called the Cornette, and Wiki has this to say:

"St. Vincent de Paul ... the founder wanted to have the sisters of this new type of religious congregation of women, that tended to the sick poor and were not required to remain in their cloister, resemble ordinary middle-class women as much as possible in their clothing - this was the reason why the cornette was adopted."

E.g., it was ordinary street-wear at the time the order began in Paris in 1633.

The Cornette seems to have become quite stylized and quite starched as time has gone on, yielding the look as shown below in an old cartoon from my avatar comic strip we did here a few years ago. (I'll bet there's a nun or two out there reading who can correct me or amplify.)

[Deleted]

Aw, God bless them. I have known many a nun in my life. Some communities are bringing back at least some sort of habit that shows their witness to God. I remember at one of the conventions of the Poor Clare's when one group got off the plane they all had some rather fantastic in pastel's. St. Clair would have rolled over in her grave.

I was taught in University by some of the Religious Sisters of the Sacred Heart. Some of the nuns wore an adapted habit while the more liberal and daring looks like Anne Oakley.And there were three places on campus where they lived. One group looked like nuns. another group were conservatively dressed and another dressed like ranch girls. But I really like those who I had as professors, expecially Sister Patty-she taught me physics what a time that was she was a walking brain.

[dave]

AQ, there are a lot of nuns in my life, a circumstance that really surprises me when I think about it. I just finished a two year program that was based at a Monastery in Ontario and we had lots of nuns involved, all as fun loving as I've come to expect. My first spiritual director was a catholic nun, a chemistry professor in the Hudson Valley, but tied to her order back in Ohio where she spent the summers. After two years our schedules began to conflict due to my work and to her having to remain at school because of time delays she had to put up with in the use of a supercomputer that her work was on in Palo Alto. My second director was an older retired Episcopal nun who was an artist and lived as a solitaire on a nearby mountain. In a cabin, no less! She was the person who most encouraged me to write, so we have her to blame for it. When I moved down south we had to give it up. I miss her and gave her a part in a factual story I wrote, called Hope. It's here:

www.windsweptpress.com/hope.pdf

[dave]

I'm no historian, so check out what I write with an authority before you think of quoting anything here. So after that disclaimer, I'll say that before 1900, Utica pretty much ended at the Parkway on the south side. The Proctors were responsible for the Parkway, by the way, and its purpose was to join the major parks on the edge of the city, TR and FT Proctor Parks fronting on Culver Ave., and Roscoe Conkling Park (The Zoo, The Eagle.) The principal neighborhoods were East and West Utica. Everything, residences and business, had of course begun down by the Mohawk River, which ran much closer to Utica proper before it was moved north when the Barge Canal was built. You can see the Mohawk came right to Baggs Square at the foot of Genesee and John Streets in this 1883 map.

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The business district was in the Broad Street area, trade, wholesale and even retail. Plus, out Whitesboro Street to the Chenango Canal (today's arterial), which brought coal to the city from Pennsylvania to be shipped out on the Erie Canal.What today is the (Not So) Busy Corner was prime residential territory, up the hill from the commercial district. Hence, the location of Grace Church. Common folk lived in East Utica and West Utica, mostly below Rutger and Court Streets..

Great waves of immigration buffeted the city in the late 1800's and early 1900's. The underdog Irish finally got a bit farther up the food chain and relinquished a lot of their housing to the newly arrived Italians leaving their war-torn nation. Cornhill was still filling up as World War I loomed. Many of the 2-family homes west of Blessed Sacrament were built around this time.

By 1900 a new class of merchant office workers was able to secure wages that were a little better than those paid in the factories and nicer homes were built south of the Parkway. Enough of this middle class was Catholic and they wanted a sanctuary built to worship in. Our Lady of Lourdes Church was officially dedicated in 1917.

At first O.L.O.L was rather like a mission church of St. John's, Utica. But when Father Jim Collins arrived, it really got organized. The parish's old church when I was kid was rumored to have been built from the remnants of a fortune-tellers's mansion. I have no idea if that is true, but in any event the flock felt the church would do for a while and they decided to first build a school and later a new church. Not just any school, either, but an institution that would attract Catholic children and their families as a place to take center stage in the lives of parishioners.

Father Collins was a visionary, some said, but he evidently wasn't a seer of the stock market, which would crash a year after this drawing was revealed in the May 27, 1928 Sunday Utica Observer Dispatch.


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[dave]

I don't know where the money came from, but Father Collins bought up the neighborhood, eventually owning the stone mansion across Barton Avenue we called The Priory. It included property stretching from Genesee Street to Sunset (Perkins) Avenue and would eventually be home to the new church and a convent. I'm guessing Collins would have preferred to close off Barton Avenue between Genesee and Sunset and have a great swath of grass to the north of the school's entrance. Without Barton Avenue bisecting the property, quite a campus would have resulted. And then O.L.O.L might have started buying up Cornwall Avenue and Fairfax Place, which ran south behind the school. But I'm simply speculating.


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[dave]

Yes, I know. This thread is titled, "Utica Catholic Academy." But many of UCA's students, including myself, came from Lourdes School. So too did many come from Mount Carmel, but I know nothing about Mt. Carmel.

[dave]

OK, we're almost at the end of the Lourdes detour. Here's the article in the OD announcing plans to build the school. It's worth getting your glasses out and reading.

Click to enlarge. Firefox users click twice.

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[dave]

No, I don't remember a bowling alley. Does anyone before I was there from '52 to '57?

[dave]

My baby brother wound up sharing the tiny room with my grandmother. He always said he was glad he was too young to remember bunking in with his first roommate. My father’s commute to work in the morning was bothersome, too. He worried about the car not starting, and if it did, he worried about the coming winter and snow covered roads. My mother missed running down to the corner for a loaf of bread. And she found annoying having to count the number of telephone rings which would tell us if the call was for us or one of 12 other neighbors. She’d lose track after five or six rings, and we were number eleven. Heat had to be delivered in the form of fuel oil. Once it didn’t arrive on time and Dad had to drain all the plumbing for the night and drive us through a snow storm over to our Aunt Toot’s house. But especially grievous to my father was that we boys couldn’t go to a Catholic school, something he felt was his solemn obligation to provide for us, and something I needed for my feeling of well being.

All of this soon proved too much for Dad’s limited sense of adventure. He stopped by the Pine Nut Builder’s office on a Saturday morning and gave back the house. We had to be out by the end of December. My mother wanted to be settled somewhere by Christmas. We moved on Christmas Eve, landing in West Utica, a mile’s walk to O.L.O.L

Even though the billboard on Whitesboro Street proclaiming “Welcome To Utica” was plainly visible as we snuck back into the city on the day before Christmas, I would have been forgiven for entertaining the possibility that we had landed in Post War Europe or a Polish Immigration Roundup. Behind Faxton Hospital, as the terrain ran downhill toward Lincoln Avenue, the only neighbors who spoke English did so with difficulty. We had dropped down into a demilitarized zone between the mostly Irish parish of Our Lady of Lourdes and the White Eagle environs of the Polish Holy Trinity Church. Because we were technically in Holy Trinity territory, and because Dad was a stickler for following the rules, he set out to apply for our admission to the Holy Trinity Parish School. But when he could find no nun with a good command of the English language … so he said … he high-tailed it up to Lourdes and begged sanctuary for his sons. O.L.O.L quickly took us in and happily accepted Dad’s tuition check.

My feelings upon arriving at the school on Barton Ave. wouldn’t have been much different than those of the Pope coming home to the Vatican . The building was constructed in the architectural style of a 12th century castle and fortress that Ivanhoe would have been proud to own, and I’m sure he would have sworn allegiance to Rome on the spot had he been offered the keys. The hallways were darkened in monastic reverence and the entire building smelled of sacred candles. Statues of the saints, wall mounted crucifixes with palm branches affixed all brought back peace in my soul. All the kids were in school uniforms and the nuns softly padded the halls in their medieval regalia. God was in his heaven as the sun shone bright (figuratively) and everything was Roman Catholic all over the place.

To Be Continued.

Excerpt from the book Nowhere, copyright David Griffin, 2011.

[chris]

Dave I went to Mt Carmel but only from grade 1 to 3 and remember very little to contribute. Father Burton sticks out most in my head...because of his voice.

[dave]

I only remember playing Mount Carmel in basketball games when I was at Lourdes. And kids from UCA who said they went there. I dont' even remember where it was. Out Kossouth?

[dave]

The following ad would have appeared in the Daily Press shortly befoe the school on John St. closed for good in June of 1960. I don't remember being aware of such classes offered at night. Actually, it seems a strange endeavor for a downtown Catholic high school, although it shouldn't. And if the ad is saying 18 classes, that's a long haul.


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[dave]

And now we come to the inevitable. The old school building on John St. would not last forever. There were many kids who over the years hoped the place would fall down and now that might just be about to happen. I don't have access to any facts ... just rumors that I remember hearing. But had a building used for the caring of children throughout the school day that was perfectly functional and acceptable in 1834 persisted much more into the modern day than 1960, the county's Child Protective Services department would have begun to visit UCA.

I suppose there were many motives involved in the decision to create Notre Dame and separate girls' schools, but separation of the sexes never rang true to my ear. I've always thought that was the least of the bishop's reasons. And in the 1970's, of course, separating girls and boys no longer was important enough to prevent a re-consolidation of schools.

From UCA's point of view, for a while the name continued up at the old St. John's/St. Joseph's Home on Genesee St. in South Utica. And so in 1961, UCA graduated its first (in a number of years) all women class, while myself and the other boys from UCA and St. Francis became the first graduating class of Notre Dame High School.


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