Stained-glass windows at Basilica of St. Mary help tell story of former Minneapolis church

In the winter of 2021, my friends at Modern Catholic Pilgrim invited me to participate in a journey from the Basilica of St. Mary to a vacant lot in north Minneapolis about a mile away. The walk was inspired by the stained-glass windows that hang in Teresa of Calcutta Hall in the lower level of the Basilica. They originally belonged to a mission church named St. Martin that once stood on the vacant lot we visited on the corner of Bryant and Fifth Avenue North.

St. Martin was established to serve the African American community in north Minneapolis. It is not clear which St. Martin the parish was named for, but it was not, at least officially, St. Martin de Porres, who was not canonized until 1962. However, a parish can be dedicated to a patron different than its name, and Blessed Martin de Porres was the parish’s patron.

St. Martin’s first Mass was held at the nearby Phillis Wheatly Settlement house on Sunday, Feb. 25, 1940. By August of that year, the pastor, Father Leonard Hirman, had raised enough money to buy a plot of land and to break ground. Parishioners gathered on Dec. 15 to celebrate the building’s dedication with a turkey dinner. The ceiling beams had been salvaged from another building in Minneapolis, and the bell in its belfry was sourced from a railroad engine that originally belonged to James J. Hill. All told, the church only cost $9,000 (about $300,000 today). The following year the stained-glass windows were designed and installed by a local company of that time, Weston and Leighton Ecclesiastical Stained Glass & Decoration of Minneapolis.

St. Martin’s neighborhood was poor and home to people who had been excluded from living in other areas of the city. They were mainly African American, Jewish and Italian. As a mission parish, it was not expected to be able to financially support itself, and the pastor established the Blessed Martin Mission Guild to help support his work and his parishioners. The women who joined the guild lived outside the neighborhood, and many were cousins or family friends of Father Hirman.

Like many African American neighborhoods across the country, the area around the parish was transformed by redevelopment in the mid-1950s. City planners decided that nearby homes were slums and designated them to be cleared in 1956. Public, low-rent housing units were planned for the area around the church. St. Martin was to be an anchor of the redeveloped neighborhood.

In the summer of 1958, the parish closed amidst nearby construction. During its final Mass, its pastor, then Father Francis Byrne, consumed the last of consecrated hosts and left the tabernacle door open. The church’s statue of Blessed Martin de Porres and its stained-glass windows were removed for safe keeping, and the building was boarded up. The closure was meant to be temporary, but the parish never reopened. More than 1,000 families were displaced by the neighborhood clearance, and most never returned. Instead, the Archdiocese of St. Paul and Minneapolis sold the building and land to the city, which later sold it to Prince of Glory Lutheran Church.

The windows, however, returned to the church. The archdiocese gifted them to the new congregation, who used the church as a central hub for social ministry in the local neighborhood until 1995. From 1999 until 2004 the Lao Evangelical Lutheran Church used the building to serve the local Southeast Asian community. But the church was ultimately demolished by the city in 2006 in a new round of redevelopment. Today, the windows from St. Martin are owned by the Minneapolis Area Synod of the ELCA, and they are on loan to the Basilica.

Luiken is a Catholic and a historian with a doctorate from the University of Minnesota. She loves exploring and sharing the hidden histories that touch our lives every day.