The Church Builder: Patrick Charles Keely

by Robert T. Murphy, appearing in Volume 49

American Catholic architects have generally received too few accolades, but more than a century after his death, the founder of the field is mostly unknown even within the Catholic community. No major book or dissertation has been written on him. His extreme modesty and neurotic shyness were such that almost none of his words are available in print. He refused interviews, disliked writing or public speaking, and forbade his children to speak of his achievements. Yet Patrick Charles Keely made a massive social and artistic contribution to the American Catholic world.

He  designed many of U.S. Catholicism’s colleges, schools, hospitals, and most of all, their churches. Dubbed “The Church Builder” by the Catholic and secular press of his time, Keely’s output was staggering. Depending on what sources you believe, during his lifetime, he designed between 400 and 700 churches and institutional buildings on the North American continent. It is known for certain that he designed twenty-three cathedrals, and at least 150 churches, many of them the architectural marvels of their respective cities.

His artistic output was equally astonishing. Keely worked in the Classical Revival, Gothic Revival, Romanesque Revival, and Second Empire styles. Not all of his buildings were great, nor did he feel comfortable working in every style, preferring Gothic and Romanesque. But he created some awe-inspiring works from Maine to Wisconsin and from the Gulf of Mexico to Canada.

Patrick C. Keely was born in Kilkenny, Ireland, on August 9, 1816. Keely was trained by his father, William, a builder in Kilkenny and Tipperary. An early biographer of Keely, Francis W. Kervick, noted that between 1829 and 1837, Keely’s father was engaged in the building of Saint Patrick’s College, Thurles. From 1838 to 1840, he was erecting the district hospital in Thurles. His son, however, left Ireland shortly before the Great Famine hit the isle.

Arriving in the Port of New York in 1842, the young Keely settled in the city of Brooklyn, where he began carpentry work. In the immigration records of the time, he is listed as a “farmer.” This designation was used because no one with a skilled trade or training in a trade would have been allowed to emigrate from the British Isles.

Around this time, another person in Brooklyn would prove an important influence in Keely’s life.

Father Patrick Moran, who had employed Keely to do “some ordinary work about his church,” introduced him to Father Sylvester Malone, who had been a student of his at Lafargeville Seminary in New York.

Malone and Keely had strikingly different personalities. Keely was a shy, quiet man who kept to himself.  Indeed, he would not change much in personality during the rest of his life. Malone, by contrast, was a brash, lionizing preacher who relished publicity and leadership. At the opening of the Civil War, he would go over to the center of New York’s Five Points district, a capital of New York’s poorer Irish life, and declaim on the need for the New York Irish to enlist in the brigades and fight for the Union cause.

In 1847, Malone had been sent by his bishop, John Hughes of New York, to found a Catholic parish in the Williamsburgh sector of Kings County, just across the East River from Manhattan Island.

Malone’s new acquaintance had a good advantage for the job. Keely was local labor, and Malone needed to gather information on construction in a hurry. He sized up Keely, decided that he liked him and his work, and concluded that he should be the architect of the new church. But there were immediate obstacles, mainly in the person of Bishop John Hughes.

Malone and Keely found that Hughes wanted his brother-in-law, William Rodriguez (an architect-partner of James Renwick, who finished the design of Saint Patrick’s Cathedral on Fifth Avenue) to design Malone’s new church.

Malone was disappointed but determined. The stubborn priest, a shrewd politician and gifted diplomat, got Keely to make up a set of plans, and the two studied the specifications and costs in order to make a second presentation to Hughes.

As Malone explained it:

I had Mr. Keely prepare a detailed estimate of the cost of the whole building, which I studied over and showed to a few practical Catholic parishioners, men well-to-do, and having a knowledge of building, who were well-known to the Bishop… When he ran his eyes over the figures he was amazed how low the cost would be and said, ‘Well, you can go ahead.’

The cornerstone of this church, Keely’s first effort, named after Saints Peter and Paul, was laid on May 31, 1847.

This design of this first church represents a good chance to study Keely’s abilities. In later years, he would be rushed in his work, yet produced able designs. In Saints Peter and Paul’s, he was hampered by a limited budget and his own inexperience. But his design was more than competent for a “maiden voyage.” It was a triumph of imagination. The 31-year-old architect produced an effect of monumentality and ornamentation on a plot of land only 100 feet by 60 feet.

In his 1952 Catholic University of America master’s thesis on Keely, H. L. Wilson notes: “Each man’s life may have an annus mirabilis. It would seem that 1848 was Keely’s.”

This is because even before Saints Peter and Paul was completed, Keely was called on by Father Richard Kein to design Saint Bridget’s Church on Avenue B and East 8th Street in New York City. This building, typical of Keely’s early small parish churches, was begun in early 1848 and completed and dedicated on December 2 of that year.

Work was begun on another church, Saint Mary’s in Newport, Rhode Island, on August 7, 1848. The Gothic design was yet another advance in Keely’s artistry. Soon Keely began work on the Cathedral of Saint John the Evangelist in Cleveland, Ohio. The cornerstone was laid on October 29, 1848, and consecration took place on November 7, 1852. This was the first of his twenty-three cathedral designs.

His next step up would teach him even more about church building, artistry, and the tribulations of professional life. In the design and building of Albany’s Cathedral of the Immaculate Conception, Keely made his breakthrough from competence to artistry. As with many of his other works, it was not fully completed for several decades, since construction progressed only when the parishioners had enough funds.

Keely’s cathedral work expanded in 1851 when the Diocese of Buffalo, New York, had need of a cathedral. In 1847 the Dioceses of Albany and Buffalo were created out of the New York Diocese and, as Keely had begun work on the Albany Cathedral, so too planning was begun on a cathedral for Buffalo.

Three years later, in 1850, the cornerstone was laid for Keely’s Cathedral of Saint Finbar in the genteel center of Southern culture, Charleston, South Carolina. Both Buffalo and Charleston were fine examples of English Gothic Revival.

When Keely’s career was only five years underway, a young fellow Irishman made his own journey across the Atlantic Ocean to the United States. James Murphy (1834-1907), born in County Tipperary—the same county where Keely’s father lived and worked—found his way to Keely’s office in Brooklyn and in 1852 was taken on as an apprentice.

Murphy worked for Keely for several years, and when his apprenticeship ended, Keely took him on as a full partner, forming the firm of Keely and Murphy, ecclesiastical architects. They would go on to run regular ads in such important Catholic publications as the Boston Pilot.

On July 9, 1857, work began on the Church of the Immaculate Conception in Providence, Rhode Island. Murphy, journeying there to supervise work on the church, took a liking to the New England locality. In the early 1860s, Murphy decided to move to Providence, where the firm of Keely and Murphy opened a second office in 1864, making the considerable New England workload more manageable.

Soon an opportunity to build Boston’s cathedral arose. Keely, who had done previous work in the diocese, counted on the recommendation of his friend, Father Malone. Malone’s cousin was the Very Rev. William Byrne, a high official of the diocese.

The overall length of the proposed Cathedral of the Holy Cross dwarfed anything Keely had ever envisioned. The cathedral was 364 feet in length and, at its widest, 170 feet across the transepts. Two smaller but spacious chapels were built into the floor plan to provide more intimate forms of ceremony and worship.

In the main façade on Washington Street was a rose window above the organ enclosure. The façade was fashioned of a local brownstone called Roxbury pudding stone. It was trimmed by lighter colored sandstone and gray Quincy granite. The roof was laid in a pattern work of American and imported Welsh slates to enhance the cathedral’s exterior coloration. The slate was completely replaced, however, during a twentieth-century renovation.

In 1869, the Keelys moved their home from Hudson Avenue to 257 Clermont Avenue, in what is now Brooklyn’s Fort Greene section. Their new home was a pleasant brownstone row house on a wide cobblestone residential street. Number 257 was at the top of a small hill with a gentle slope in a more genteel section of Brooklyn.

Nineteen-year-old John, Keely’s oldest son, had joined his father’s “office” as an architect, as had his seventeen-year-old son Charles. The youngest, William, would grow up to attend Saint John’s College in Brooklyn and the New York University Medical School, after which he would become a physician in Brooklyn.

By the 1870s, Thomas F. Houghton had entered the Keely architectural practice. He and Keely worked exceptionally well together, and he began to feel like one of the family.

In his master’s thesis, H. L. Wilson remarked of the architect’s cathedrals that they would continue “… for many years to be an abiding monument to Keely’s genius. We shall do well to remember that the cathedrals were the objects of Keely’s special care and attention.”

In 1853, the Diocese of Brooklyn, consisting of the entirety of Long Island, was created out of the former Diocese of New York. Bishop John Loughlin, formerly the vicar general of the Diocese of New York and a top aide to Bishop Hughes, became the founding bishop.

Dreams of a fine cathedral for the new diocese were never far from his thoughts. In 1860, he arranged for the purchase of a plot of land atop a perfect hilltop. Bounded by Greene, Vanderbilt, Lafayette and Clermont Avenues, the 200 by 470-foot parcel was one of the highest and most visible hills in Brooklyn.

Construction of the foundation began in 1865, and on Sunday, June 21, 1868, the cornerstone was laid in front of a crowd of 25,000 attendees, including a vast collection of prelates and priests.

Monsignor John K. Sharp, historian of the Brooklyn diocese, described it:

Keely’s plan called for one of the largest and grandest churches in the New World. It was to be of thirteenth-century French Gothic as revived by the elder Pugin, of ‘clustered shafts, moulded bases, decorated caps, richly traceried windows, varied statuary, pinnacled and gabled canopies.’

The building would have been based on the Abbey Church of Saint-Ouen in Rouen, France, a masterpiece of French Gothic. Sharp added,

The building, of blue granite trimmed with white, and with buff and gray tracery, would front 160 feet on Lafayette Avenue. An extreme outside length of 354 feet was planned, a width at the transept of 180 feet, and front towers 350 feet in height. Its cost was estimated at over $1,000,000.

Another description from the papers of Thomas Meehan, Brooklyn Catholic historian, noted,

The small towers of the transept will be 27 feet at the base and 185 feet high. The top of the nave roof will be 112 feet high above the level of the street in front. The aisle walls will be 57 feet high and the nave and transept ceilings will be 85 feet above the floor and the aisle ceiling 56 feet. The chief peculiarity of the interior arrangement will be the great height and importance given to the aisles.

The sum of $1,000,000 for a cathedral in the late nineteenth century in Brooklyn was staggering, but Brooklyn was a rich and powerful urban area by then. Bishop Loughlin wanted a monumental cathedral which would outshine Saint Patrick’s in New York.

Unfortunately, work stopped on the cathedral when the first story was done, with the explanation that Loughlin considered charitable institutions more necessary than the cathedral.

The unfinished cathedral’s fate was not a cut-and-dried matter. By the late 1870s, more than $600,000 had been spent on the foundation and first floor of the structure. Bishop Loughlin had grown nervous, especially since several U.S. dioceses had gone to the edge of bankruptcy building their cathedrals. He ordered Keely to cut back on the ornate sections of the structure.

During Keely’s lifetime, U.S. Catholic architects’ works were frequently shunned by establishment architects and writers, who often showed anti-Catholic proclivities. Had the Brooklyn cathedral been finished following Keely’s original plans, he would have attained immortality in the pantheon of U.S. architecture.

In a 1968 article in the Brooklyn Tablet noting the centenary of the cornerstone-laying for the cathedral, Catholic church art and architecture writer James F. Johnson headlined his piece, “The Cathedral That Never Was,” in a fitting epitaph to the Brooklyn Cathedral of the Immaculate Conception.

Lay Catholics did not receive much coverage in the U.S. Catholic Press. The editor of the New York Freeman’s Journal, James McMaster, in an article praising a new church designed by Keely, took on the lack of appreciation:

In the spirit of a true Catholic artist, Mr. Keely never fixes a price for his services. Priests and laymen competent to judge have alike said in our hearing, that, had he charged according to the works he had done in the United States he would be very wealthy. It occurs to us to suggest whether the beneficiaries of the many fine churches he has designed and superintended in building would not be doing a just as well as a graceful act, in uniting in making up to him, in a monied testimonial, some part of what has not been rendered to him, as his professional merits have deserved, while the churches of his designing have been in the process of building. We hasten to say we have not exchanged a word with Mr. Keely nor had the scratch of a pen or any message from him for twenty years. He may be much offended at this, our public reference to the many inadequate compensations of his years of loving labor. But we think we are right in making the suggestion we do.

Churches, like all other bodies, ought to pay their debts of justice and honor, as well as the legal demands made on them.

The University of Notre Dame created the Laetare Medal in the 1880s to honor lay figures whose devotion to the Catholic Church in America would otherwise go unnoticed. The second recipient of that award, announced in 1884, was Patrick Charles Keely.

By this time, another of Keely’s masterpieces was ready for erection. The Cathedral of Saints Peter and Paul in Providence, Rhode Island, was one of his best works, and it came to be built at a time and in a city where his former partner James Murphy seemed to have the edge on local Catholic church work.

The new cathedral was 198 feet in length and 136 feet in width. It was constructed of brownstone with two towers, which were never fully completed. It cost more than $400,000.

The building’s exterior was completed by 1882. The more elaborate interior took nearly seven years to finish. Rich woods, including mahogany, ebony, English oak, and African woods, plus a variety of domestic and imported marbles, went into the upper church. The cathedral’s magnificent stained-glass windows were commissioned from Pustet and Company of New York and constructed in Austria. Pustet and sculptor Joseph Sibbel were two firms Keely used frequently, and he called upon them again in his design for Saint Joseph’s Cathedral in Hartford.

If Keely’s greatest design was his unfinished Cathedral of the Immaculate Conception in Brooklyn, New York, and if his best-built and still-standing work is the Cathedral of the Holy Cross in Boston, followed by the Cathedral of Saint Peter and Paul in Providence, then his best-built but no longer-extant work is Saint Joseph’s Cathedral in Hartford, Connecticut. Started and finished in the 1880s and 1890s, it stood as the architect’s proud masterpiece until it was destroyed in a December fire in 1956.

Saint Joseph’s Cathedral was 268 feet in length, 178 feet in width at the transepts and 93 feet in the nave. The square towers, 150 feet high, would have sported spires adding 100 feet, but they were never finished.

Keely provided for a large area in the rear of the upper church for the choir loft, including room for the 40-foot-wide organ case. This would surround but not obscure the rose window in the main façade. Large chapels dedicated to Mary and the Blessed Sacrament were in the floor plan of the main floor, while two additional votive chapels were in the nearby space. The main floor could hold 2,200 people for worship. John Welch and Company of Lowell, Massachussetts, provided the pews and oak confessionals.

When the cathedral was destroyed by fire on December 31, 1956, so complete was the devastation that the stone walls, cooked by the heat, had to be torn down with no chance for any restoration work.

In 1889, Keely’s son Charles traveled to Hartford to complete details on the cathedral complex there. He contracted a cold, which soon developed into pneumonia, and the young architect died at the bishop’s residence in that city in December 1889.

The ingrained sense of Irish fatalism may have steeled Keely for past blows, but Charles’ death overwhelmed the now-old man as had no previous tragedy, and it broke him.

As an architect, teacher, and parent, he wanted more than his buildings to survive. He had taught the builder’s trade and skill to his sons and his son-in-law, Tom Houghton, and had witnessed with pride the budding of artistry in their work. But John had died in 1879 and Houghton, who founded his own firm, left no partner or successor. And now Charles was gone. Soon after the burial, Keely suffered a stroke.

In the bedroom of 257 Clermont Avenue, there seemed to be nothing left. Nothing to do but wait and die, sitting in bed all day, lighting an occasional small cigar. He had grown a long, white beard, giving himself an added touch of distinction in his old age.

With the Brooklyn Cathedral seemingly destined never to be finished, Keely had one last chance for a great design that would stand for the best of what he could do: the main church of what would be the centerpiece of the campus of Saint John’s College in Brooklyn. The campus church would outdo Keely’s spectacular Baroque Saint Francis Xavier Church in New York City as a match for the Gesù Church in Rome.

Yet Keely’s plans for Saint John’s were, as in other designs, stymied. The church had to be shortened in length by one bay. Problems arose with the finances and with the contractor. Some of Keely’s grand designs for the church were dropped.

Patrick Keely died on August 12, 1896, at age 80 during a brutal late summer heat wave. After his death, many churches still wanted a Keely design, and there was some unfinished work in the office. Tom Houghton took on some of the work, but there were no official or unofficial successors. The remainder of the work was undertaken by Dr. William Keely, who set aside his medical practice for a time to discharge any building obligations. The brilliant son had gathered enough knowledge of architecture from his father to qualify as a more-than-able architect.

There are many other reasons for Keely’s lack of architectural immortality. Keely’s personal and professional papers have been unavailable to researchers. Dr. William Keely gathered up his late father’s professional papers and renderings and asked Keely family cousin Monsignor Joseph McNamee, pastor of Saint Teresa’s Church on Classon Avenue and Sterling Place in Brooklyn, to store them for him. The complete papers remained in one of the church’s towers until 1927, when McNamee died. After that, they disappeared into diocesan storage spaces. A Keely relative destroyed his personal papers and letters, including several hundred pages of Spenserian poetry he had written, claiming that they were nobody’s business.

But his real immortality lies in the hundreds of buildings, still standing across the North American continent, which display his genius and devotion both to his craft and to the Church.