By the 1950s, Most Blessed Sacrament’s school in West Philadelphia was the largest parochial school in the world. By 2002 it had two hundred and fifty pupils left. Sixty-eight churches, schools, hospitals and one cemetery on this road tell some version of the same story, in brick.
An immigrant parish raised a Neo-Gothic sanctuary to seat two thousand. A religious order built a normal school for the brothers it trained. Every one of these buildings was sized for a congregation, a student body or a patient population its founders expected to keep growing.
Most Blessed Sacrament was founded on farmland in 1901. By the 1950s its school was the largest parochial school on earth. Then the families it served moved to the suburbs, the factories that employed them closed, and the parish merged away in the 1990s. The school shut in 2002 with two hundred and fifty pupils left on the rolls; the church followed in 2007. Its stained glass went to a parish forty miles away. St. Edward the Confessor, pictured here, ran the same course: fifteen hundred pupils at its peak in 1970, closed by 1993. Both buildings stayed standing. Neither congregation did.
Not every one of these buildings is waiting on a wrecking ball. An asylum campus for eight thousand patients a year became a federal headquarters. An Art Deco school became a public charter in 2016. The oldest congregation on this trail has been meeting since 1695 and never stopped.
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