The Church of St. Stanislaus the Bishop and Martyr in Detroit is deeply ingrained in the local history. When the church was built, the area was a huge construction site. It was very busy, trade and services developed, and so did Polish social and cultural institutions such as the Fredro Theater and the Polish House. Despite many problems these were the good times for the church, the street, the Polish district and the city. Before the automotive industry appeared, Detroit was a small regional center. At the turn of the century it had a population of almost 300,000 and was one of the largest cities in the USA. As long as car production went well and was based on manual labor, the city developed. Admittedly, it did suffer crises, such as World War I and the recession of the 1930s, but this did not hinder the development of the city in the long term. Around 1950 it was a metropolis with more than 1.800.000 inhabitants and the driving force had been the needs of industry during World War II.

However, the rapid development based on large automobile factories also became a source of problems. First of all, racial divisions were growing, and the AfroAmericans brought to the city in great numbers during World War I were treated as cheap labor. The color of their skin limited their social advancement, the possibility of moving to better districts or earning more. At the same time the white residents of the city earned more and more and were increasingly willing to move away from the city center, which was made possible by the constantly developing metropolitan area transit system. The car companies relocated the factories outside the metropolis with a view to decentralization and avoiding mass protests. In addition, the automation of production played an increasingly important role, but it did not avert the crisis. The first serious riots erupted in 1943, and 34 of the city’s inhabitants lost their lives; the next riots in 1967 resulted not only in killing 43 people, but also in causing many injuries and considerable damage from looting and arson. These events determined the future of the city. Detroit began to be perceived as a dangerous place. More and more people moved to the suburbs, real estate prices began to fall, house owners would sell or even abandon their houses and move out of the city. As a result of the dire economic situation the number of inhabitants of the city fell to about 700,000. Since 2010 there has been a trend towards investments and even though the number of inhabitants continues to decrease and today Detroit has a population of about 670,000, there is optimism and slogans such as “Nothing stops Detroit” boost people’s hope for a better future.

Poles have been an important social group in Detroit since the end of the 19th century. It was the second biggest “Polish city” after Chicago and in the 1920s the Polish community amounted to 120,000, which meant that approximately one in 10 inhabitants of the city had come from Poland. It is possible that this number was even greater, because the nationality of some of the people who emigrated during the Partitions was recognized as that of the state they had arrived from, particularly Germany. Anyway, Poles constituted the largest ethnic group in the city. The Polish community was mostly settled in Poletown. The Poles were not very much part of the city’s elite, they were rather a workforce; as a white community they had a greater possibility of assimilation, although there are examples of hostility towards the Poles on record, such as making it impossible for them to move to certain districts. However, they also took part in the migration process. They went away, leaving behind an empty space, an urban prairie, a void, like the area near St. Stanislaus’ Church, where the houses have been demolished. The church itself has not fulfilled its original function since 1989. First it changed hands a few times, then it was sold to a religious community, now it has been put up for sale again. Judging by its condition, one may doubt whether it will survive until the gentrification of the city reaches the neighborhood. Anyway, will it survive even then?

The architecture of the church is not outstanding, just eclectic. The façade, which was to be modelled on Il Gesù, has two towers added on the sides, a characteristic element of “the Polish Cathedrals”. The body and the transept with arcade forms may bring to mind rundbogenstil, fashionable in American architecture. Only the red brick actually gives the structure coherence. This eclectic mix of styles has an interesting origin. The parish was founded in 1898, but the construction of the present church began in 1911, according to a design by Harry J. Rill (1854-1923). He was an architect of German origin who emigrated to the States and in 1883 began working in the office of Peter Dederichs and then Elijah E. Myers. Probably around 1890 he started his own practice. The use of historicized forms was imposed on him and was in line with the trend expressed in a brochure published by the Polish National Alliance National Convention in 1913, where this style was presented as the most suitable for Polish churches. We do not fully know why this happened, whether it was to oppose the modernist tendencies, or maybe to use historical references in order to create a national style based on the architecture of the Commonwealth’s heyday, as it is hypothesized today. Nevertheless, such recommendations were issued, and the Church of St. Stanislaus is a not quite successful attempt to put them in practice. At the time of its construction it was already a strongly traditionalist style, although still commonly used in American ecclesiastical buildings. Unlike in most of the “Polish Cathedrals”, the interior of the church was single-aisle. In the late 1940s St. Stanislaus’ was the largest Polish parish school in Michigan.

Chronology

1898 - establishing the parish and purchasing buildings for the church and school

1911 - starting the construction of the current church and presbytery

1913 - completion of the current church

1921 - construction of the convent

1926 - remodelling of the school

1928 - launch of a secondary school run by the Felician Sisters

1970 - closing the secondary school

1978 - restoration to stained-glass windows

1989 - closing the parish and listing the church on the National Register of Historic Places

1995 - the building was purchased by the University of Michigan

1995 - purchase of the building by the Promise Land Missionary Baptist Church

2013 - the building was put up for sale

Text originally published in a book issued by the POLONIKA Institute.
Anna Sylwia Czyż, Bartłomiej Gutowski, Paweł Sieradzki, Polish Parishes and Churches in Milwaukke, Winsconsin and Massachusetts, Warszawa 2021, pp. 103-109.