[Continue along Brookside, then turn left at Montebello Road, stand at the corner of Marmion Street]
There are a whole series of buildings that make up Our Lady of Lourdes – the church, the “convent”, the parish center, the rectory and the school. Tucked in here all together there is a campus-like feel, a little oasis in the neighborhood. Our Lady of Lourdes grew up between two breweries (Haffenreffer, which we just visited and the Franklin, which you can see above the church over on Washington Street) where many of the parishioners would have worked. This parish was a German-Irish one (skewing on the Irish side). The parish was the second off-shoot of St. Thomas Aquinas and started in 1896. It was the parish of Mayor James Michael Curley and he provided quite a bit of funding to build up the parish.
We just passed the original church building (which now serves as the parish hall) on Brookside Avenue. It was the first building erected here in 1896. For the first 12 years, Our Lady of Lourdes served as a mission and then in 1908 became an independent parish. In 1931 a much more ornate church was built with an interesting mixture of Renaissance Revival and Art Deco details. It’s architect was Edward Graham who also designed St Paul’s Church near Harvard Square and St. Elizabeth’s Hospital in Brighton. He had a 50 year career designing institutional buildings for the Catholic Church throughout New England. It’s said the Mayor Curley stipulated that the roof be made with this extra steep pitch so that it would not cut off sunlight to the houses on either side. The interior of the church features Connick stained glass windows and altars dedicated to Mary E. Curley (his first wife), Dorothea Curley (his daughter) and James M. Curley Jr. (Mayor Curley's son).
The school building dates to 1916 and continued as Jamaica Plain’s last Catholic school until 2010. The rectory is on the opposite corner and was built in 1920. The Convent building (dating to 1926) now houses a community of Capuchin monks. Our Lady of Lourdes survived the parish closing of the early twenty first century and it remains a thriving parish. The parishioners now are mostly Spanish-speaking, reflecting the shift in the neighborhood's demographics.