Landmarks

Being an old-style working-class neighborhood, the two biggest landmarks in the Irish Channel are the two churches. The Redemptorist Fathers were assigned to minister to the faithful of the Garden District and Irish Channel, and they did so through the parish of St. Alphonsus. There was a bit of a cultural rift in the neighborhood, however, as the French didn't want to go to church with the Germans, the Germans didn't want to go to church with the Irish, and the Irish felt the same way about the other two groups. The best way to settle the situation was for the good fathers to say different masses for all three groups. This led to three churches being build in the neighborhood: Notre Dame on Jackson Avenue (French), St. Alphonsus on Josephine Street, and St. Mary's Asumption on the corner of Constance and Josephine. Notre Dame burned in the 1830s, but the French community in the neighborhood had shrunk to the point that it wasn't practical to re-build. That left the Irish and Germans, who built the two magnificent buildings that exist today.