Beneath the timeworn Gothic vaults of St. Adalbert Church in South Bend, visitors may see a religious labor mural painted by John Mallin, a Chicago-based artist, in 1940. During my first visit to the parish in 2021, it was as if time had paused as I joined with the coalminers, ironworkers and weavers portrayed in looking above a smoke-belching factory at a sorrowful message emblazoned on the sky. It is Genesis 3:19 — “By the sweat of your brow, you shall eat bread” — rendered in Polish above an image of Christ thrice fallen under the weight of the cross.
When I was applying to graduate schools, my discovery of St. Adalbert’s labor mural beckoned me to Notre Dame. I wanted to understand the close relationship between the work and religion of the Eastern European migrants who braved the harsh conditions of industrial America to organize some of the first automobile workers’ unions in the country at the Bendix and Studebaker factories.
As a doctoral candidate in the Department of History, I study and document the churches constructed by those Eastern Europeans in the urban Midwest. But I am also interested in how these monumental churches can generate cultural heritage tourism to promote economic development in deindustrialized communities. So, when St. Adalbert’s pastor, Father Ryan Pietrocarlo, CSC, ’11, ’16M.Div., asked me to write the church’s nomination for landmark status on the National Register of Historic Places, I eagerly joined the nascent project and put my ideas on public history into practice.
Over 120 years ago, Polish migrants founded St. Adalbert as a diocesan parish to serve the community’s needs. Each wave of newcomers from Poland expanded the parish, beginning in the 1890s with economic migration and ending with World War II refugees. Eventually, the church’s institutional footprint covered several city blocks. It included a school and social hall and, as I uncovered, it even served as a bank for several decades.
Today the links between spirituality and solidarity endure. St. Adalbert continues its mission to serve migrants as a center of South Bend’s Mexican American community. Under the Polish labor mural, a new generation of working-class parishioners is making its way in America. Alongside the feast day of the church’s patron, Šw. Wojciech, San Adalberto, or St. Adalbert depending on which language you speak, the community now celebrates Cinco de Mayo and the feast of Our Lady of Guadalupe.
The church itself, designed by the prestigious Chicago architecture firm of Worthmann & Steinbach in 1923, is showing its age. According to a 2023 engineering report, immediate action was needed to keep the cost of repairs from ballooning to $10 million, leaving the magnificent structure’s future uncertain. And while St. Adalbert is among the largest and most vibrant parishes in the Diocese of Fort Wayne-South Bend, the community needed help to fundraise and navigate the world of church restoration.
For the landmark nomination, I applied my skills as a historian — translating documents from Polish, combing through parish records, preserving fragile photographs — and learned new skills like how to draw floorplans and meet the requirements of federal preservation law. The nomination qualified St. Adalbert for grants totaling more than $500,000 from the nonprofit preservation groups Partners for Sacred Places and Indiana Landmarks, kickstarting the fundraising process and enabling the parish to replace its roof and begin brick masonry repairs in 2024. Then, in April, a state review board voted to include St. Adalbert on the Indiana Register of Historic Sites and Structures. The National Park Service followed on May 19, and the parish is now officially listed on the national register. With essential repairs completed, the next phase is to restore the church’s interior: replacing water-damaged plaster, cleaning the paintings and repainting the nave.
Notre Dame affiliates from a range of disciplines have enthusiastically participated. Students from the School of Architecture and its Duda Center for Preservation, Resilience, and Sustainability, working with Professor Stephen Hartley, documented the church’s Tiffany-quality stained glass windows. Madeline Johnson, who directs the Church Properties Initiative at the Fitzgerald Institute of Real Estate, developed the project as a case study for students. Civil engineering Professor Kevin Walsh ’09M.S. donated a structural report. And now, Professor Karla Badillo-Urquiola of the Department of Computer Science and Engineering is launching a research initiative using qualitative, human-centered computing to support the restoration and capture the history of the broader Hispanic community in South Bend.
Preserving a church as significant as St. Adalbert — affectionately dubbed the “Cathedral of the West Side” for its immensity — is no easy task. In addition to the Notre Dame faculty and students, the process convened a wide range of stakeholders, many for the first time: parishioners, city officials and local small business owners working together for the area’s future.
The Mexican American community anchored at St. Adalbert has restored life not only to these old industrial neighborhoods but to the whole city. The 2020 U.S. census recorded South Bend’s first population growth since the Studebaker closure in 1963. From St. Adalbert you can walk along Western Avenue to taquerias and ice cream shops. Across the street, a supermarket is replacing a decaying gas station, recreating the community feel of a neighborhood once filled with Polish delis and corner bars. Many hope a plaza and fountain will be built in front of the church, where kids might kick soccer balls and the community could gather after Mass, with room for a farmers market to set up its stands.
Volunteering with Pietrocarlo and his parishioners showed me that the benefits of historic preservation extend far beyond a single building. The restoration started dialogues between Polish and Mexican parishioners, brought investment to a side of town that few visitors to South Bend ever see, and strengthened connections between the neighborhood and city. As I finish my doctorate, I aim to expand these efforts on a regional scale to bring together community members, practitioners and academics to study and preserve the living legacy of these beautiful and important Rust Belt churches.
Gavin Moulton spent the spring semester in Rome conducting research for his forthcoming doctoral dissertation, “Revolver on the Altar: Fighting for Church and Factory in the Slavic Industrial Belt, 1877-1941.”