History of St. Nicholas Parish

PASSAIC  St. Nicholas Parish here served as the mother church of much of the earlier Catholic expansion in and around Passaic — 10 national parishes and the former St. Mary’s Hos­pital, all in the city, and Sacred Heart and St. Paul parishes, both in Clifton. Earlier, it ministered to European immigrants and now serves a Hispanic population.

The earliest Catholic Mass in Passaic took place in 1768. After competition for immi­grant labor shifted to Paterson with the arrival of the Erie Rail­road, Irish immi­grant labor returned to the city in the late 1840s with the growth of the Dundee Manufac­turing Company and development of the textile industry.

Originally, Irish Catholics in the area worshipped at St. John the Baptist Parish in Paterson or St. Francis de Sales Parish in Lodi. Franciscan Friars of St. Boniface in Paterson founded St. Nicholas in the 1860s. In 1868, Bishop James Roosevelt Bayley of Newark designated the community a parish and appointed a pastor.

A combination wooden church and school was built on Prospect Street, but in 1875, a fire destroyed the building.

Construction of the current Gothic-style church on Washington Street was completed in 1885. Built in a classic-basilica design, the church features a center tower that dominates the front façade, a one-story L-shaped stone chapel, extensive use of ceiling frescoes, cut and highly varnished pine floor beams and rafters, and stained-glass windows, which were imported from Europe. Installed around 1910, the windows portray biblical events and parish activities. In 1979, the church was given “historic preservation status” by the State Depart­ment of Environ­mental Protection.

In 1992, Msgr. Robert Carroll, St. Nicholas’ pastor at the time and now a retired diocesan priest, led a $615,000 exterior and interior restoration project of the church. It included repair of the weather­­-ravaged brownstone exterior of the church and rectory with special attention to the roof, windows, and belfry of the church to prevent further deterioration.

St. Nicholas helped St. Mary’s Hospital take root in Passaic in 1896. It’s third pastor, Father John Sheppard, lent the parish clubhouse to the hospital.

The parish opened its rectory to house the Passaic Neighborhood Center for Women (PNCW), which opened in 2013. Last August, PNCW moved from St. Nicholas to the convent of St. Stephen Magyar Parish on Third Street in Passaic. The former location at St. Nicholas is once again being used as a rectory for the newly combined Our Lady of Fatima/St. Nicholas Parish.