Philly & Stuff: Our Lady of the Blessed Sacrament Convent and School

1938

Ran into the closing article of the closing of the oldest RC Afro-American Parish in Philly at 12th and Lombard.

Saint Peter Claver Church

Saying Goodbye to Philadelphia's first black Catholic church

Which got me onto an old mental data bank search on my memory to identify a RC Catholic school where I tutored some students in the late 1960s.

This is one of those memory things I have been meaning to research for some time. Problem was the starting point and a bunch of strung together bits and pieces of memory. Of memories from high school and a semester of going to some poor parish in North Philly to tutor a child for an hour or so on a Thursday with his reading.

The bits and pieces have to do with driving with a bunch of fellow high school students at North Catholic High under the label of "community service corp" who got convinced into volunteering for the tutoring task in an afternoon Chemistry lecture with Father Reese. Father Reese was also the driver of the one school bus used for the sports teams and going to their events etc. And my Chemistry grades sucked, so I thought it prudent to volunteer for the Chemistry professor's last minute plea to show up at two schools in North Philly for the tutoring programs there.

Freshman Chemistry btw was lab, first period Monday, Wednesday, and Fridays and in the winter the windows were wide open same as the rest of the year to no doubt vent the gases that might build up in a laboratory. And Tuesday and Thursday fifth period after lunch in the Chemistry lecture hall where two freshman Chemistry classes shared one teacher and lecture.

The thing is this, about twenty students packed into this rickety red school bus, a school color, and I remember that it got bought with green stamps in a high school wide drive my older brother got involved with as a student in the same high school. Never been on a school bus and did not realize how shaky and noisy one of these things were along with their tight little seats.

The first ten students got dropped off somewhere along the way, which I do not remember in terms of geography or architecture. The longer ride down Broad Street was a mystery ride to me. Along the way, some kid mentioned that those buildings were Temple University and soon afterward we were in a dark alley of a street one block over west of Broad. Then into some very basic building, the smell of pine oil hitting my nostrils as we entered. It the smell of pine oil that was one of all institutions or schools and was a normal smell to me in such places.

Never saw the front of the school and the thing is that this was a poor parish. One could tell. The school over a basement had four classrooms on two floors above that basement and in retrospect I cannot remember any windows. Light was from florescent lighting above. The four classrooms taught grades 1-8 or maybe 1-6. Which meant that at the very least, two grades shared a classroom which meant a lot of down time for half the class in reading or writing assignments as the other half learned at their level. Like the old fashioned one room school houses in rural America and colonial America etc.

I had not been able to document my experience back then. In my mind, I thought the school was "Saint James". But in retrospect I think I was talking or assigned to my tasks in the school by a Sister Saint James and or Sister James, an Afro-American nun in her late twenties and or early thirties. That after a semester of tutoring on Thursday afternoon, Sister James I will call her, announced that the school was closing. To which I optimistically asked if they were moving into a new school. To which she said no. The school was closing. I was not too up on social issues. One of the articles on the closing of St. Peter Claver Parish mentions that black Catholic Churches suffered in the wake of the Civil Rights movement, no doubt implying that Black Catholics no longer needed to be segregated per say, whatever.

My memory thing conflicted with the fact that "Sister James" was black. That I knew that the order of nuns Mother Katherine Drexel founded to teach the Native "Indian" and "Colored" population had no, and accepted no applicants from those demographic communities in its early days. This was another factor in trying to piece together where exactly did I tutor in 1967.

I recently finally found an article in the online version (new?) of the Catholic Standard and Times regarding the dedication date of the Annex built for Northeast Catholic High for boys in the 1960s. I still went, with search words like north broad street or black school etc and could find no hits on that site, its existence and sadly no mention of its closing in June 1967.

But after the use of maps and using the Philly History photos of the recycled church at 712 N. Broad Street, first Presbyterian from 1878, Roman Catholic from 1910-1972 and lately Baptist, that the RC church of Our Lady of Blessed Sacrament sent me searching for a school which through the process turned out to be the back end of an old brownstone mansion (the convent) and side yard (schoolyard?) of the Mission Convent of Mother Drexel's Sisters of the Blessed Sacrament pictured above from a side angle.

Broad and Parrish West Side