WWW.QNS.COM RIDGEWOOD TIMES FEBRUARY 13, 2020 19
OUR NEIGHBORHOOD: THE WAY IT WAS
Protesters outside the St. Saviour’s Church site in February 2008 calling for the church’s preservation, and the creation of a public park on its land.
Photo: Robert Pozarycki/Ridgewood Times
the remaining half to be developed. That
wasn’t good enough for the JPCA and others
who wanted to keep the site in tact.
For the next two years, the battle over
St. Saviour’s raged. Gallagher and the
JPCA, which were previously aligned
with each other (Gallagher had earned
the group’s Man of the Year award in
2004), became bitter enemies engaged
in a “holy war” of sorts.
The two sides battled in the press and
on the civic scene, with a second, shortlived
civic group — the Maspeth Middle
Village Civic Association — launched by
the councilman’s supporters to rival the
JPCA.
At one heated JPCA meeting in September
2006, Gallagher and some of his allies
were present. When the councilman
attempted to address the crowd, the civic
group’s executive members denied him
the opportunity — and he walked out.
Later on during the meeting, a JPCA
member protested the decision not to
allow Gallagher to speak, and criticized
Holden and the civic group’s handling of
the matter. In response, one of the JPCA
executive members at the dais unplugged
off the speaker’s wired microphone.
The battle over St. Saviour’s, and between
Gallagher and the JPCA, raged on
into the summer of 2007 when scandal
derailed the lawmakers career. Sexual
assault allegations led to Gallagher’s
arrest in August of that year; the following
spring, he pleaded guilty to a lesser
charge and resigned from offi ce. Meanwhile,
with its eff orts to preserve the site
stymied, the JPCA fi gured out another
way to preserve the historic church.
In the spring of 2008, aft er a major
fundraising eff ort, the JPCA worked to
have St. Saviour’s Church dismantled.
Piece by piece, frame by frame, the
church was carefully taken apart like a
completed jigsaw puzzle.
The civic group arranged to have
the pieces stored off -site until raising
enough funds to rebuild it at another
site. The plan was to re-erect the church
on an unusable plot of land in All Faiths
Cemetery, off the corner of 69th Street
and Juniper Valley Road, in Middle
Village.
Though the group was successful in
saving the physical church, the eff orts to
have the city turn the Maspeth site into a
public park fell apart.
To this day, the church remains in
storage — and its former home is now
occupied by warehouses that fi gure to
be there for many decades to come.
* * *
If you have any remembrances or old
photographs of “Our Neighborhood: The
Way It Was” that you would like to share
with our readers, please write to the Old
Timer, c/o Ridgewood Times, 38-15 Bell
Blvd., Bayside, NY 11361, or send an email
to editorial@ridgewoodtimes.com. Any
print photographs mailed to us will be
carefully returned to you upon request.
Engineers marked every piece of St. Saviour’s Church, beam by beam, during
the dismantling eff ort. Photo: Robert Pozarycki/Ridgewood Times
Renderings, published in the Ridgewood Times in July 2009, of the
restored St. Saviour’s Church and the site in Middle Village where the
church would be rebuilt. To this day, the project hasn’t been started.
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