Holy Innocents Church
- Architect
- Worthmann & Steinbach
- Style
- Romanesque Revival
- City
- Chicago, IL
Holy Innocents Church was founded in 1905 as a Polish parish in what is now Chicago's East Village neighborhood, designed by Worthmann & Steinbach in the grand, oversized manner of the Polish Cathedral style. The congregation's first church and school were bought secondhand from the St. John Evangelical Lutheran Church, whose building dated to 1867, before the parish built its own quarters within the old Polish Downtown network of churches.
the building
A borrowed start. Before building its own church, the young Polish parish purchased its first church and school buildings from the St. John Evangelical Lutheran Church, which had built them in 1867.
the style
Holy Innocents is built in the Romanesque Revival style, adapted here to the scale and opulence typical of Chicago's Polish Cathedral-style parish churches.
More on Romanesque Revivalsignificance
The parish remained an ethnic Polish congregation until 1975, when it was given territorial boundaries; from 1999 to 2009 its former school housed the Bishop Alfred Abramowicz Seminary. In 2021 the Chicago Archdiocese merged Holy Innocents with St. Malachy + Precious Blood and Santa Maria Addolorata into a new combined parish.
nearby
- John Lathrop Motley Public school
- Elizabeth Peabody Public School
- Polish Museum of America
- Holy Trinity Church
- Polish National Alliance Building
- St. John Cantius in Chicago