During Doors Open Milwaukee 2024 – between weekend errands – I squeezed in a rushed stop at St. Hyacinth Roman Catholic Church, which has been on my must-visit list for a while, and was pleased to find a beautiful 1883 cream city brick church in what appeared to be tip-top shape.

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It was refreshing to see such a big, old church – this one designed by Swiss-born architect Henry Messmer – looking so good.

Later, after being invited back for a far more in-depth visit, I learned why.

Even though it’s among the poorest congregations in the diocese, St. Hyacinth, 1414 W. Becher St. on the South Side, has about 1,000 member families, which in itself is pretty amazing for a city church these days. I’ve visited lots of churches and many can only dream of a membership in the triple digits, much less quadruple.

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But that’s not all. The membership at St. Hyacinth lends a hand to make sure its spiritual home is maintained.

Members have created a large artwork for the sanctuary and have painted the walls here, for example.

One volunteer is Ken Smith, whose great-great-grandparents helped found the congregation, which began as an entirely Polish church but is now an almost entirely Latino one.

“My great-great grandma was so proud of it, that her obituary said she was one of the first in St. Hyacinth,” says Smith, who has been volunteering in a number of ways, including by researching and writing the application to get the church added to the National Register of Historic Places, no small feat, especially for someone without experience doing it. 

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“My grandpa went to school here. It was genealogy research that got me interested in (the church),” says Smith, who lives on the East Side with his wife, who is from Ecuador. “This neighborhood isn't the wealthiest, and so the church was threatened with closure. The archdiocese was talking about selling the church because the roof needed repair.”

Smith says the archdiocese estimated the roof at that time to be 78 years old.

“My research suggests it was 98 years old,” Smith adds. “So that's when I started getting involved. I started as a volunteer and then I ended up getting married here, and my wife and I have since joined the parish.

“It's been really fun being absorbed into the community. I love research and genealogy and also I get a sense of what my Polish ancestors went through when they came here to the U.S. through the majority Latinos today.”

That ethnic duality – which is also continuity in the sense that this immigrant church is still, or again, an immigrant church – is really the story of St. Hyacinth.

“St. Hyacinth is the third Polish Catholic church in Milwaukee,” Smith explains. "It split off from St. Stanislaus because they were overcrowded.

“Polish immigrants sacrificed a lot to build these beautiful, beautiful churches. St. Hyacinth is more modest than let's say the Basilica (of St. Josaphat), but the mentality was that these parishes were the centers of the neighborhood. The neighborhoods were named after their churches.”

Immigrants began arriving in Milwaukee from Prussian- and German-controlled partitioned Poland in the second half of the 19th century, seeking opportunity and religious freedom, especially during the Kulturkampf which pitted the Prussian kingdom against the Catholic church.

Initially attending Holy Trinity Church in Walker’s Point, some Poles bristled at worshiping alongside Germans for political reasons, and by 1866 formed St. Stanislaus on Mitchell Street in 1866 and St. Hedwig on Brady Street six years later.

When the South Side parish began to burst at the seams, Pastor Jacek “Hyacinth” Gulski divided the parish, creating St. Hyacinth and leaving St. Stanislaus to lead the new parish.

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Over time, Gulski would become one of the most prominent and respected Poles in the United States, but his route here was anything but easy.

Gulski was born in Chelmno (called Kulm at the time, when it was part of West Prussia) in 1847 and attended seminary there. He then joined a Franciscan order in Laki, but ran afoul of the Kulturkamp’s 1873 Falk Laws that required government approval of clerical appointments, Smith says.

“One requirement of those laws was that Catholic clergy register with the imperial government,” he says. “I believe just about every Catholic bishop within the empire was arrested, and so Fr. Gulski became a wanted man after saying one Mass, because he didn’t register.

“And so the story goes that he fled persecution by hiding in basements, nooks, even a chimney. He was on the run for a while. He fled to the Netherlands, where he lived for six months before coming here to Milwaukee (in June 1874).”

After initially being assigned briefly to Berlin, Wisconsin, Gulski served as an assistant pastor at St. Stanislaus, before rising to the role of pastor.

According to a Wikipedia entry for Gulski, “Many were surprised by this move, as obviously St. Stanislaus was a prestigious posting for a priest. However, Father Gulski had a missionary zeal to build houses of worship for his beloved Polish community in Milwaukee.”

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In fact, St. Hyacinth would also help birth three new South Side parishes – including St. Vincent de Paul (1888), Sts. Cyril and Methodius (1893) and St. Adalbert (1908) – during Gulski’s tenure, which ended in 1909, by which point Gulski had become a monsignor.

Over less than a decade (with one exception), the new parish would erect a complex of buildings – all of which are still standing – on Becher and South 14th Streets.

The church was first. Designed by Messmer – whose cousin, Sebastian Messmer, was a Milwaukee archbishop – construction began in spring 1882, with the cornerstone being laid on June 2.

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Other area church work by Messmer – also known for residential, industrial and commercial buildings – includes St. Hedwig Church (1886) and school (1890) on Brady Street, SS. Peter and Paul Roman Catholic Church (1889) on the East Side, the School Sisters of Notre Dame Convent’s Francis Hall (1890) on South 9th Street, and St. Casimir’s rectory (1894) in Riverwest.

According to the Wisconsin Historical Society, the builder of the church was John Bentley and Son with August Talbert contracted to do the masonry.

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The Italianate, cream city brick church with a limestone foundation and sandstone detailing, was officially consecrated on April 1, 1883 and named in honor of the 12th & 13th-century Polish Dominican priest and missionary, who was canonized in 1594.

Spanish-speakers call St. Hyacinth San Jacinto.

At 136 feet long by 62 feet wide with a tall bell tower capped by a Polish-influenced copper-covered domical spire and a smaller cupola that filtered light into the sanctuary via a skylight, St. Hyacinth was – and remains – a dominant feature of the neighborhood skyline.

In fact, repeatedly spying that bell tower from the bleachers at South Stadium is what led me to finally cross the building off my to-do list by visiting.

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Messmer also designed the 1884 schoolhouse next door. The cream city brick exterior of this gem – which closed in the late 20th century and now houses a bustling food pantry – was cleaned in 1990. Inside some original details remain – including wainscoting, blackboards and staircases, though much was lost to changes over the years.

As was common in wood-frame schoolhouses, the top floor had originally been an open space that served as the parish hall and, like, the gym/assembly room, but it was partitioned into classrooms around 1892, when the stand-alone parish hall was completed across 14th Street.

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The Queen Anne-style rectory, which stands between the school and church, is another Messmer work, according to the Wisconsin Historical Society’s architectural inventory.

It has beautiful patterned masonry on the exterior, which could use a good cleaning someday. Today, this serves as offices, housing for young Jesuit Corps volunteers and meeting space and is connected to the church via a late 20th century addition.

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Just north of the school is the convent, which was completed in 1884, between the schoolhouse and rectory, which suggests it might also be the work of Messmer, but it is fairly basically executed on the exterior and no one seems willing to attribute it to the architect.

“It's pretty astylistic,” Smith opines, “so I'm guessing contractors just put it together, but there's no record of that.”

That building, these days, is rented to a crisis resource center.

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The aforementioned parish hall and school gym building across the street was designed by Bernard Kol‚packi and built by contractor John Czaplewski and carpenter Herman Krause. Interestingly, Kolpacki had served as carpenter on the school building.

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The facade of this cream city brick Romanesque Revival building, sold by the church a few decades ago and now home to a Protestant church, was once topped with a central Second Empire-style tower, the base of which can still be seen.

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In 1919, a powerhouse was built at the north end of the site along a now-vacated alley. Its boilers used to heat the entire complex via a steam system that’s long gone. The building’s only above-grade floor has served as a garage and is now storage for the parish’s popular annual festival, held the second weekend of August.

The lower-level, where the boilers were located, is now empty.

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By this point, however, Gulski had left St. Hyacinth, having been transferred in 1909 to St. Hedwig – after a scandal that Smith says involved trustees embezzling funds – where he was pastor until his death in December 1911.

(Interesting side note: the Gaetano Trentanove-sculpted statue of Tadeusz Kosciuszko that stands in Kosciuszko Park – funded with private donations – is believed to have been presented to the City of Milwaukee by Gulski in 1905.)

Decades after the pastor’s death, he was still remembered, as in this 1934 Polish language reference held in the church archives ...

“There is not a single Pole in America from the older generation who would not have heard about Fr. Gulski. He was famed as a golden-tongued preacher, an excellent singer..., a passionate Polish patriot, who never hesitated to defend and support his countrymen in word and deed. Sociable, friendly and kind-hearted, hospitable to a fault – a typical old-school Polish man.”

Gulski’s replacement at St. Hyacinth was young Fr. Boleslaw E. Goral, who had arrived in the U.S. in 1889 and attended seminary in Detroit and at Milwaukee’s St. Francis Seminary, where he would serve as a professor after being ordained in 1899.

Seven years later he was chosen to start the Nowiny Polskie newspaper as a rival to the existing Kuryer Polski, sparking a bitter Polish-language newspaper battle that’s a whole story in itself.

In 1907 he was assigned to St. Vincent de Paul Church before arriving at St. Hyacinth, where he would leave a mark of his own, serving at the church for 51 years.

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During my visit, while in the attic of the rectory, which serves as a defacto archive, Smith – whose surname is an Americanization of his family’s original Polish surname, likely spelled "Schmidt" or "Schmitz" – shows me a portrait of Goral, as well as a huge framed poster with headshots of members of a Polish society, including his great-grandfather and great-great-uncles.

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With Smith, who is extremely knowledgeable about the history – thanks to his incredible research and passion – as well as the buildings (thanks to his role on the buildings and ground committee), we visited nearly every nook and cranny of the complex (except the hall, no longer owned by the church, and the convent, due to the sensitive nature of the work carried out by its tenant).

We saw both floors of the 1919 powerhouse, got a look around the school, including the basement, where you can see the solid construction and what appears to be an opening where a steam pipe ran under 14th Street to the 1892 hall.

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We saw an incredible inlaid floor, office woodwork (and old safe with Fr. Goral’s name painted on it) and an elaborate plaster ceiling in the rectory.

We ducked into the small basement under the apse – most of the ground below the church building is unexcavated – checked out the attic, which due to the flat ceiling in the sanctuary is flatter than most 19th century church attics I’ve seen, and even climbed the tower up to the bells.

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On the way up the four ladder/staircases we spied some planks with carved graffiti, though it was clear they'd been repurposed here, as the graffiti that ran across multiple planks is now broken up.

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We declined to go further up to see the clockworks (which are in need of repair) for a variety of reasons.

Of course, we also visited the sanctuary, which has undergone a number of changes including to the painted motifs, the floor, the pews and the aisle arrangement. The church rail is gone, but segments of it were incorporated into various parts of the altar.

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However, much survives, including the paintings on the walls and ceiling, which got a touch-up after some water damage that led to the long-overdue replacement of the roof, which should protect things for years to come.

Three ceiling murals painted by Swiss-Italian immigrant painter – based in Chicago – Louis Rusca, who specialized in fresco painting and trompe l’oeil appear as vibrant as ever.

Meanwhile, the paintings on the side walls were executed by another Chicago-based Italian artist, Joseph Vittur. Born in 1853 in San Cassiano in the Province of Bolzano-South Tyrol (though back then it was part of the Austro-Hungarian empire), Vittur studied art in Vienna, where he met his future wife. He immigrated to the United States in 1893 on La Touraine.

Both artists were active around the Midwest, with work surviving in Ohio and Illinois (in Vittur’s case) and at Notre Dame in Indiana (in Rusca’s).

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Also still in place are almost all the early stained glass (except for three examples removed from the apse due to their poor condition; those are in the archive for now in hopes they can someday be repaired or recreated), the 1923 organ pipe array in the choir loft and lots of Polish family names inscribed in the windows and plaques.

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As we stand in the choir loft with current pastor Rev. Fr. Fabian Rodas FMM, gazing out over the sanctuary, we can also see how those surnames share the space with more recently arrived traditions.

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To the left of the altar is a banner and shrine representing the church’s Peruvian parishioners. On the right is a vibrant and colorful Dia de los Muertos altar.

To the right of that in the tympanum above a door is an icon of St. Juan Diego kneeling before Our Lady of Guadalupe added in 2019. Serving as a background is a modernist wooden installation created by parishioners.

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The majority of parishioners these days are Mexican, though there are also Ecuadorans, Puerto Ricans, Peruvians, Nicaraguans and Colombians. Fr. Fabian is Guatemalan.

“For me, it's a privilege to have been welcomed into the community,” says Smith. “Many of the first Latinos here weren't necessarily treated the greatest by all of the majority Polish-Americans at the time. But I've come across pictures from the ‘80s with Polish-Americans and Latinos hanging out, having a good time, so it wasn't everyone.

“But part of it was they were afraid of the Latinos, and part of it was that Polish-Americans saw these churches as theirs and that they didn't want to share with other groups.”

Fr. Fabian says that the attitude toward the church is not so different for the current church members, though it seems that may be changing, at least a bit.

“For them, the church is like a home,” he says. “Many of them, when they come here, the first thing that they search for is a church. Immediately they're connected with something that they feel in their hearts.

“And it is interesting how many seminarians now, American seminarians, are studying Spanish and want to be involved in the community. For example, in these two communities, St. Anthony and St. Hyacinth, we have two seminarians that are American. One of them, his Spanish is good, the other is starting out with Spanish, but it is nice to see that they are interested.  

“The church knows that the future of Catholicism in the United States is in the Hispanic community because they have this tradition, so they want to serve them. It's nice to see these young men having this experience with this community.”

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Smith, too, though not a priest, is also enjoying his experience in the parish.

“It’s a very tight-knit community and through my work here they've welcomed me in,” he says.

“I partake in a lot of the Mexican customs because different customs are fun.  It's been really fun because I know enough Spanish where I can communicate. I apologize a lot for my Spanish and then Father Fabian will correct me from time to time.”