February 17, 2011
By Staff Reporter
“It was such a big deal at the time that priests came from Boston and all over the Northeast to see it,” said Edward Furey, the president of the Keely Society (www.keelysociety.com), which organizes an annual symposium about the architect’s work.
The only other New York area examples of Keely’s work from the 1840s are St. Mary’s in Yonkers, since converted into a hall, and the sacristy of St. Brigid’s on Avenue B in Manhattan, which is due to be demolished by the New York Archdiocese.
Even if Keely hadn’t produced such skillful work, historians argue, he would have been much in demand because he always delivered, on time and within budget.
One key to his success was his organization of the enthusiastic supply of Irish immigrant labor and money. It was the era when “the women gave their paychecks and the men gave their backs,” said Peg Breen, president of the New York Landmarks Conservancy.
The Enfield, Conn.-based Furey said his own Galway-born grandfather worked long hours in his spare time digging the foundations of an Upstate New York church.
Keely built churches all along the Eastern seaboard of North America, from Ontario to New Orleans, and as far west as Chicago and Watertown, Wis. When a city father in Watertown heard the architect was from his own county of Tipperary, he imported a hunk of the Rock of Cashel to be incorporated into the church.
“Keely also built many fine churches for the Jesuits and the Dominican order,” Furey said.
Known as honest and straight talking, he had one major career disappointment. His 1868-designed Cathedral of the Immaculate Conception in Brooklyn was to have been the biggest in the Western Hemisphere. It was never completed, however, because the Civil War had made orphanages a priority, said Furey, and it was eventually demolished in 1931.
Almost all of the 700 buildings credited to Keely still stand, and while he’s not considered among the greatest of church architects, his reputation is secure.
Architectural historian Katharine Zeltner has written: “Although Keely’s designs are fairly conventional, his pureness of forms and attention to details read clearly in his work, making them distinctive.”
Keely died in Brooklyn in 1896 at age 80.