Staten Island Advance
December 8, 2001
Something to celebrate at St. Clare’s
The Great Kills parish, the Island’s largest and hardest hit on Sept. 11, finds joy in its newly renovated cardinal Cooke Center.
By Karen O’Shea – Advance Staff Writer
The newly renovated parish center at St. Clare’s R.C. Church is full of color and architectural firsts, with wavy walls and ceilings inside, and fiber optic acrylic panels on the preschool windows outside.
It also represents some good news for a church awash in sadness since Sept. 11, when the terror attacks on the World Trade Center claimed the lives of 30 members of the Great Kills parish.
St. Clare’s has handled 28 memorial and funeral services for those lost, and clergy and volunteers have been reaching out to the families devastated by the attacks.
No wonder that there is comfort in the newly renovated building, also known as the Cardinal Cooke Center, where preschool classes meet three times week in the early Childhood Center. On Wednesday, a group of young dancers in pink tutus met in a classroom sometimes called the “teapot room” for its bright, bulging wall.
On Sunday, preschoolers led parishioners to the new center for a blessing and dedication ceremony.
“It was really a great gift to have this”, Monsignor Joseph Murphy, St. Clare’s pastor, said of the event. “It may be the first really joyous occasion we have had since before Sept. 11”.
The building is both secular and spiritual, according to architects David Businelli and Stephen Perrella.
The center includes a curved, corrugated metal ceiling and incorporates a technique known as hypersurface, which allows walls to be multifunctional, with windows and furniture built into the cured spaces.
“It’s an entirely different approach from just putting up a wall and painting it”, said Perrella, who developed the hypersurface method and teaches at Columbia University. “The leap of faith here is that the wall, for us, is as close to moving as a static wall can be. It’s like frozen movement”.
That was important, he said because of the floor plan for the 1979 building was very dense and the church needed to accomplish a lot of different activities inside the center, which was not increased in size during the renovation.
“The neutral straight wall would have been the worst thing to do here”, he said.
The architects used acrylic panels in rainbow colors on the window outside. The curved panels mark the side of each window and include fiber optic cables, which keep the windows lit at night.
The primary color of each window panel is continued inside the building, in painted bands, said Businelli, president of Salvadeo Associates Architects and a member of the parish.
“When children are being taught at that very early, formative age, the architectural message is that all color is wonderful and they should be as open as possible. Instead of picking one color and saying, ‘this is the color’, we tried to give all colors”, he said.
Wall lines, shelves and classroom furniture are also built to a child’s horizon. For example, a glass block window is placed at a height of three feet, six inches in one classroom wall.
“These are very basic. Off-the-shelf materials, but a very imaginative design”, Bobby Bulger, parish manager, said of the work.
In practical terms, the $500,000 renovation helped create better layout and classroom space for the preschool, which has 180 students.
St. Clare’s had planned to make some necessary repairs to the ventilation system and roof, but decided instead to use the opportunity to overhaul the building, which was built before the school offered a preschool.
The newly renovated building also offers disabled parishioners a view of the gym on the lower level.
Before, disabled parishioners and visitors could not watch sporting events because the only access to the gym was by staircase. Now, they can sit in a classroom with glass panels looking out into the gymnasium, which is also used as an overflow area for mass on some holidays.
The parish itself is the largest on Staten Island and one of the biggest in the archdiocese, with 7,200 member-families. Monsignor Murphy said the church has started a fund-raising campaign to cover much of the cost of the renovation.
Dennis McKeon heads St. Clare’s World Trade Center Outreach Committee, which has provided support and services to the parish families who lost loved ones in the Sept. 11 attack.
McKeon is also a member of St. Clare’s Improvement Committee, which was formed last year to evaluate and make recommendations about the existing buildings at St. Clare’s parish.
He said the original dedication ceremony for the center was delayed after Sept. 11, as St. Clare’s grappled with the tragedy and juggled funeral and memorial services during much of October and November.
When it was finally held on Sunday, the event took on even more meaning, he said. “This was one of the first major renovations we’ve done and…it was one of the first major events where the parish actually got together to enjoy something since the tragedy”, he said.