Abstract: A one-hundred-foot red brick church steeple looming over the Long Island Expressway signifies New York City's outer boroughs' Catholic history to thousands making their way from Manhattan to JFK airport. The history of St. Raphael Church casts light on an important but neglected aspect of urbanization, namely the experience of Catholics on the urban periphery in the latter nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, years of slow then rapid change amid the intensive fin de siècle expansion of American metropolises. On the mid to late nineteenth-century rural but industrializing periphery of Manhattan, St. Raphael took identity as a predominantly Irish hinterland parish adjoining the Archdiocese of New York's countryside Catholic cemetery. Yet with the propulsive urbanization and industrialization that occurred after the consolidation of Queens County into New York City in 1898, St. Raphael's physical and cultural setting was transformed into an intensely urban identity, constrained by factories and expressways and transformed by the arrival of successive waves of Catholic immigrants.
Michael Pfeifer (Sun,) studied this question.