St. Michael’s Roman Catholic Church

When Raymond Almirall, trained at Paris’s École des Beaux-Arts, completed St. Michael’s in 1905, he gave Brooklyn’s Irish community their own Sacré-Cœur, complete with an egg-shaped dome that reportedly made it the borough’s tallest structure at its dedication and its second-tallest for most of the century that followed. The 200-foot campanile became such a fixture that residents used it to find their way around the neighborhood.

The parish itself dates to 1870. Poor Irish immigrants founded it, most of them manual laborers in the shipyards and industrial areas near the docks. The current church was dedicated on October 1, 1905. Four smaller domes once surrounded the main one, but they have since disappeared. Descriptions of the dome that remains usually settle on “beehive” or “bishop’s mitre.” Almirall had already tried out the shape at a much smaller chapel in Queens’ Calvary Cemetery in 1895. He also designed the original Brooklyn Central Library, though only its west wing wall was ever built to his plans. The parish school opened in 1886 and closed in 2005. In 2024, the church received a $30,000 Sacred Sites grant for roof, parapet and gutter repairs. The weekly food pantry now serves about 250 people. In 1985, the comedy film Heaven Help Us cast the church as the fictional St. Basil’s. The dome played itself.