St. Albertus Wants To Party With You

No, I haven't skipped town and gone to Europe...I'm scoping out St. Albertus, in Detroit's original Polish neighborhood, before the festival tomorrow. St. Albertus Fest is both a celebration and a fundraiser for this little-engine-that-could church, a music festival that feels like a neighborhood picnic. It is also a rare opportunity to see this church's wildly exuberant interior, and learn of its wildly - well, just wild history. If there had been reality tv in the 1880's, St. Albertus and its cast of characters would have been a long-running hit, with storylines about a controversial priest accused of misconduct (who was exiled and then returned), a riot, and a murder. The festival is from 1pm to 11:30pm on Saturday, July 31st. It was a great time the last two years, and they've added some new bells and whistles this year to make it even better.

For a preview of the interior and history of the neighborhood and the church, the detroitblog tells it far better than I could.  I visited the church and its sister parishes Sweetest Heart of Mary and St. Josaphat in winter in this older post, Polish Catholic on Canfield.

You can see preparations underway in the background. You can also see what a fine job a small group of dedicated volunteers does in maintaining the church and its grounds. Are you a lapsed Polish Catholic? Here's your chance to earn brownie points with the big guy. Hook up with this group. Mass is said once or twice a month, sometimes in Polish and English, sometimes in Latin. See the St. Albertus website for details.

Above, the rectory with its neatly trimmed hedges and stellar chimneys...

Across St. Aubin from the rectory is a previously vacant, trashed housing project that is being refurbished. Completion date is tentatively December, according to an on-site honcho.

Also of note in the neighborhood, kitty-corner from the church, is the Art Vandalism house.... a festival in its own right.... graffiti artists have turned it into a remarkable open air gallery.

The neighborhood around St. Albertus could be the poster child for discussions about "right-sizing" the city....there's lots of this....

but then there's these folks below, along with the St. Albertus volunteers, the housing project rehabbers, and many others, who are trying to build a stable village in the middle of an unstable part of the city.