• Founding of Pennsylvania Religious Tolerance and Freedom
• Catholic Faith in Western Pennsylvania
• First Parishes in Southwestern Pennsylvania
• The Location
• Parish Beginnings
• Saints Among Us

The Parish Location

The parish is rich in history and tradition. Most immigrants left the Old World for the promise of a better earthly life. Foreigners in the New World, their faith in God sustained many of these families and hardships were overcome.  The sacrifice of those generations laid the foundation for our success today. Through God's grace the parish is seeing a rebirth and growth, not only as a "service" parish but as a Faith Community. In the early 1900's over 7,000 families lived in the Strip. Over the decades, the area lost its resident population. The 2000 census listed just 160 families residing in the Strip. With the population shift to the suburbs, most urban parishes saw their membership decline. In 1993 as part of the diocese's revitalization and reorganization plan the churches of Saint Patrick, the first parish of the Diocese of Pittsburgh and Saint Stanislaus Kostka, founded in 1875 as the first ethnic Polish parish, and Saint Elizabeth of Hungary, founded in 1895 and the first ethnic Slovak parish in the city, were united into one parish: Saint Patrick- Saint Stanislaus Kostka Parish.

Life was difficult for most of the immigrants of the 1800's. What is today's "Strip District" was known as Bayardstown (also as O'Haraville, Northern Liberties, and Denny's Bottoms).  Bayardstown was a rough and tumble area of the city known for its marauding gangs and Election Day brawls. The city's first public bath house was established in the Strip at 16th and Penn in 1897 by Mrs. William Thaw, Jr. in memory of her husband.  Among the railroad yards, factories and row houses that occupied this section of the city with their dirt, noise and confusion, where everyday life was hard and dangerous, the

Poles did what they had done in Poland, built a church as an oasis of beauty, built for the future generation.  Faith, through art and architecture opposed the temporariness and imperfections around them. As carved in stone over the great rose window and portal doors  “Ad Majorem Dei Gloriam.”