Irish-born Archbishop John Hughes created Manhattan’s Holy Cross Parish in 1852 to serve the thousands of Irish Catholics moving north of lower Manhattan into what became known as Longacre Square (later Times Square) and the developing neighborhood of Hell’s Kitchen. Holy Cross maintained a strong Irish American identity into the mid twentieth century and its path charted the transformation of the disciplined folk piety created by the “devotional Revolution” in Ireland in the nineteenth century into an American Catholicism dominated by Irish-American clergy that sought to defend communalistic Catholic distinctiveness amid the rapid urban growth and burgeoning individualistic capitalism of an historically Protestant nation. Since World War II as Hell’s Kitchen has diversified and in recent decades gentrified amid urban inequality, the parish has served a racially, ethnically, and economically diverse flock that includes Hell’s Kitchen residents and commuters and travellers coming through the adjoining Port Authority Terminal transit hub.

In 1852 Archbishop Hughes appointed Fr. Joseph Anthony Lutz, who would become the parish’s first pastor, to lead the effort to organize Holy Cross Church, one of seventeen parishes that Hughes would create in midtown and upper Manhattan between 1840 and 1860 as New York City and its burgeoning Catholic population, largely recent Irish and German immigrants, burst out of overcrowded lower Manhattan districts. From 1840 to 1860, largely due to the arrival of Irish refugees fleeing the Great Famine, 1845-1849, but also due to on-going German immigration, the numbers of New York City’s Catholics expanded from 80-90,000 to 300-400,000. Holy Cross represented a northward extension of Antebellum New York’s predominantly Irish Catholicism, which had taken root in twenty-two territorial parishes largely identical with Irish identity. After early conflicts within downtown parishes between Irish and German Catholics, German Catholics were accommodated by 1865 in seven national parishes. On November 25, 1852, Bishop Richard Vincent Whelan of Wheeling, West Virginia, laid the cornerstone for the church to be built on W. 42^nd Street between Eighth and Ninth Avenues and Hughes preached the sermon. Offering services out of a temporary chapel on W. 42^nd St., Lutz oversaw fund-raising, including a “Benevolent Lares’ Fair” that was advertised in the city’s Irish Catholic press. At the same time the apparently hasty construction of the church began, in line with Hughes’ desire to respond to the city’s rapidly growing Catholic population by putting up “plain and solid” churches designed more out of “pressing want than any aesthetic idea,” as Gilded Age New York church historian John Gilmary Shea expressed it.

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One of the oldest churches in Manhattan, Saint John the Baptist is the second Catholic Church built by German immigrants.  The first, St. Nicholas Church, had been erected in 1836 to serve the Lower East Side. Those living farther north on the West Side were eager to have their own church, where Mass would be said in their native language. In 1840, a small wooden church was constructed on 30th street near Seventh Avenue and was known as the German Roman Catholic Church of St. John.

The first Mass was said on June 28, 1840. In September of that year Rev. Zacharia Kunz, OSF inscribed his name in the baptismal register as the first resident pastor of St. John’s.

During this period the nascent Catholic Church in America suffered from Trusteeism, a practice which gave lay leaders of the church full and exclusive control of all parish affairs. Because of this issue Fr. Zacharia left the parish and founded the Church of St. Francis of Assisi one block east of St. John’s in 1844.  A subsequent pastor was also unsuccessful in working with the trustees and was recalled in 1846.

On January 10, 1847, the church was destroyed by fire. The strength and determination of the parishioners enabled a brick building to be erected that same year, under the direction of the builder Johann Stein, a member of the parish. The cornerstone was laid on Sunday, March 14.      In July, 1847 Rev. Joseph Lutz was appointed pastor by Bishop Hughes.  Further Trusteeism ensued and after 4  years Fr. Lutz left St. John’s and in 1852 erected the first chapel of The Church of the Holy Cross on 42nd Street. In 1852, Fr. Augustine Dantner, a missionary of the Capuchin Province of Hungary, became pastor, a position he held for sixteen years.

In 1870, the Swiss-born Rev. Bonaventure Frey, another Capuchin who had founded the parish of Our Lady of Sorrows on the Lower East Side, was named pastor. He also established St. John’s as a hospice for the American Capuchin Order. Because the congregation had outgrown its current church and in an effort to eradicate past tensions, Fr. Bonaventure, well-liked by the parishioners,  decided to demolish the old structure and encouraged them to express their devotion and ethnic pride by building a more substantial edifice in its place.

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