Sentimental Church (Record) Sunday: St. Jerome Catholic Church, Rogers Park, Chicago

St. Jerome Catholic Church, at 1709 W. Lunt Avenue in the Rogers Park area of Chicago, is the church where my Pape grandparents, Paul Robert Pape (1896-1970) and Elizabeth Florence Massmann (1902-2000), were married on September 3, 1926.  Here are some photos I took of the church during a visit to Chicago in August 2017 - click on each to make it larger:

St. Jerome was established in 1894, with a wooden church constructed at the nearby intersection of W. Morse Avenue and N. Paulina Street, now the location of the convent building.    The current building was constructed in 1916 at the corner of Lunt and Paulina.

The exterior is described as North Italian Renaissance (or Italianate Romanesque) style, and was designed by noted architect Charles H. Prindeville (who also designed another church important to my family, St. Vincent de Paul).  In 1934, the church was enlarged, with plans by another well-known church architect, Joseph W. McCarthy.  The expansion gave the church the longest central aisle of any Catholic church in Chicago.

Here is how the interior of the church looked from its construction in 1916 until 1931 - this photograph likely taken in the late 1910s.  This is how the church probably looked when my grandparents were married there.

 (Postcard courtesy John Chuckman's Chicago Nostalgia and Memorabilia site.)

This next photo of the interior is by Eric Allix Rogers, who took a number of other photos of the interior of the church for the 2015 and 2016 Open House Chicago tours sponsored by the Chicago Architecture Center.

St. Jerome Roman Catholic Church [8 May 2015] / Eric Allix Rogers / CC BY-NC-ND 2.0

The interior frescoes and other decorations were done by Czech immigrant John A. Mallin in 1931 and 1934.  McCarthy added the colored marble Art Deco inspired altar in his renovation.  My picture below is dark because the lights were out in the church when I took it - I only had the light from the stained glass windows to illuminate it.  I was lucky to get inside the church at all to take the next two photos - a staff member kindly let me in for a few moments.

These stained glass windows are above the altar.

More photographs of the interior are on the parish website, and on a website about John Mallin.

© Amanda Pape - 2018 - click here to e-mail me.