St. Michael's Church

A brick Gothic Revival church. A square entrance tower rose at the front, its belfry pierced by tall louvered lancets and capped by a steep octagonal spire with small gabled lucarnes at its base. Three pointed-arch doorways opened the street front, and pointed-arch windows lined the flanks, each framed by stone pediments, with shallow buttresses between the bays. A taller brick building — identified as the parish rectory — stood immediately to the church's left.

St. Michael's was an Irish-American Catholic parish founded in 1849 as a companion to nearby St. Patrick's, from which it was formed. Its original parishioners were Irish immigrants who had fled the potato famine and bought the plot on North Eleventh Street in 1849. The church there, at 2200 North Eleventh, was completed in 1855 and served the heavily Irish near north side through the rest of the nineteenth century. The building stood about a block north of the Webster School and appears across the school grounds in the city's 1940s photographs of the block. It was razed in 1957 to make way for the Mark Twain Expressway (Interstate 70), whose trench cut down the Eleventh Street corridor and severed the surrounding grid. The final Solemn High Mass — with roughly 1,000 parishioners still on the rolls — was held that August on the 108th anniversary of the parish's founding. Afterward the congregation worshipped in the parish school at 2501 North Eleventh Street until the parish closed in 1975 amid declining membership; its territory was merged into Most Holy Trinity.