ST. JOSEPH POLISH (1902)

St. Joseph Polish is the oldest continuous Polish parish in the Rockies. Always small and struggling, its pride and persistence are reflected in the strength and longevity of its four Polish-American pastors. They and sacrificing parishioners built not only a handsome brick church but a convent and school. They made St. Joseph's the heart and soul of Denver's Polish community, an achievement earning the building a place on the National Register of Historic Places in 1983.

Poles did not come to Denver in significant numbers until the 1880s, when they were recruited to labor in the smelters of Globeville, the working-class town that sprang up around the huge Globe Smelting and Refining Company. Globeville was platted in 1889, incorporated as a town in 1891, and annexed to Denver in 1902. It is bounded by 52nd Avenue on the north, the South Platte River on the east and south, and interstate highway 25 on the west. By 1900, roughly twenty-five Polish families lived in this industrial neighborhood that also attracted Scandinavians, Germans, and Austrians, as well as Slovenians, Croatians, Russians, and other Slavic peoples.

In Globeville's smelters, workers earned $2.50 for a ten-hour day of hot, dangerous, physically demanding labor separating gold, silver, and other valuable metals from Rocky Mountain ores. Families struggled to make ends meet by surrounding their shanties with pig pens, chicken coops, rabbit hutches, and vegetable patches. In spring, summer, and fall, many family members migrated to northeastern Colorado to plant, cultivate, and harvest sugar beets. Daughters worked in the Lindquist Cracker Company at 3520-3530 Walnut Street; sons sought work in the Globe and Grant smelters or at the Denver Union Stockyards across the South Platte River in the Swansea neighborhood.

For houses, many Globevillians bought second-hand lumber or old boxcars from the nearby railyards of the Chicago, Burlington & Quincy and the Union Pacific. Childhood in Globeville was a scavenger hunt for survival, according to Frank Makowski:

We'd sneak under grain cars at the railyards and drill holes in them to fill up burlap bags with wheat. And we'd go over to the stockyards because if a new calf or lamb or pig was born in transit, the guys unloading railroad stock cars would give 'em to us. That way we could help our families put a meal on the table.

Life was grim, and Polish families in Globeville longed for the comfort of their own national parish. A neighborhood church would also save them the two-mile walk on Sunday to the Annunciation church. On September 27, Poles held a meeting organized by St. Martin's Lodge, Group 134 of the Polish National Lodge, and the St. Joseph's Society, Group 62 of the Polish Union of North America. These two pioneer Denver Polish lodges spearheaded formation that day of the St. Joseph Polish Roman Catholic Church and School Committee. Bishop Matz responded with a letter authorizing the Polish community to raise money for a national parish, an at-large, citywide parish for all members of the ethnic group. The Germans had St. Elizabeth's (1878), the Italians had Our Lady of Mount Carmel (1894), and the Polish wanted St. Joseph's.

Bishop Matz appointed Theodore Jarzynski, a Polish born Holy Cross priest trained at Notre Dame, the first pastor on July 14, 1902. James Tynon, a Denver real estate man, donated four lots, and Konstanty Klimowski, a teamster in the parish, cleared the site. Another parishioner, Frank Wargin, had Father Jarzynski live with him and say daily and Sunday Masses at the Wargin home, 4698 Pennsylvania Street. The $2,000 church was constructed by the Frank Kirchoff Company of Denver. This small brick church, thirty-two-by-sixty feet, was completed in time for Christmas Mass, 1902. The tiny parish of about twenty-five families had grown to over 100 families by 1920, when Father Jarzynski persuaded the Colorado & Southern Railway to give him an old frame depot for a Sunday school and meeting hall. It was dragged to the northwest corner of East 46th Avenue and Pearl Street, next to the church and called "the Green School" because it was painted C&S green.

Father Jarr, as he was called, taught catechism classes, punishing errant students with long-remembered pencil raps on the nose. Father Jarr helped organize the Polish Literary Club and boasted that "Globeville people are reading more, proportionally, than any other part of Denver and only one-third of this reading is fiction." He also perpetuated old country traditions such as the outdoor processions from the church with the monstrance carried under an embroiderd silk canopy. The paraders, decked out in flowers and their Sunday best, sang Polish songs as they visted the Polish National Alliance Hall on Washington, Globeville's main street, and stopped at the outdoor altars erected at the homes of parishioners.

Father Jarzynski died June 14, 1922, and was replaced by an American-born Polish diocesan priest, John Guzinski. Father Guzinski enlarged the church by knocking out the back wall for a $2,700 addition in 1923. The old Green School was replaced in 1926 by a $21,000 brick school designed by Sidney G. Frazier of Greeley. This two-story structure had four large classrooms on the second floor. The first floor had a 200 seat auditorium and a convent for the five Sisters of St. Joseph, an order of chiefly American-born nuns of Polish descent with a motherhouse in Stevens Point, Wisconsin, who came to the Denver diocese in 1926 to staff St. Joseph School.

The school, which charged no tuition and was open to nonparishioners, was supported by carnivals, such as the lavish mock Polish wedding staged on the parish grounds, August 18-19, 1935. Father Guzinski frowned on all the spoofing and gaiety but welcomed the $2,500 profit. After the parish debt was liquidated in 1959, St. Joseph's raised $56,000 to build a convent, in 1965, for their cherished teaching nuns. Henry Podzinski, a civil engineer and a parishioner, designed the convent at 4626 Pennsylvania Street. When the Sisters of St. Joseph left, the handsome, two-story brick building was converted to St. Joseph's Home, a senior residence, in 1977. The school closed in 1971 and became Ron Lyle's Boxing Gym, an academy of the pugilistic arts. After one of the longest pastorates in archdiocesan history, Father Guzinski died on April 4, 1969. He was replaced by his one-time assistant, Father Edward Fraczkowski, a graduate of St. Thomas Seminary. Father "Fraz," as he was affectionately known, guided the parish through some of its darkest days. Parishioners were displaced and separated from each other and from the church by construction of interstate highways 25 and 70, which intersected in Globeville at the notorious "mousetrap."

"Globeville is Denver's dumping ground," complained one parishioner:

We get whatever other neighborhoods don't want: smelters; stockyards; public housing; rail yards; the city asphalt plant; the city sewage system; and the freeways. And whenever they excavate for a high-rise downtown, they dump the dirt on us. Huge trucks the size of boxcars are rumbling through here all the time, shaking our houses on the foundation and even moving the statues of the saints on their pedestals at St. Joseph's.

Many Polish parents saw their children prosper and move away from the Slavic neighborhood of tiny but tidy homes clustered around the church. "Our people," Father Fraz noted, "are spread all over town, but they still come back for marriages, baptisms, and funerals . . . to keep the old customs." They came back for Father Fraz's funeral after his death in 1973.

Jan Mucha, the assistant pastor, became the fourth shepherd of St. Joseph's. Born in Nowy Targ, Poland, he first worked as a priest in the Krakow diocese under the cardinal who became Pope John Paul II. Father Mucha had fallen in love with Colorado while vacationing in 1971, and St. Joseph's welcomed this stout, spirited priest, who showed the same drive as his three predecessors. Father Mucha refired Polish pride and the parish role as the center of Polish activities, from Solidarity rallies to neighborhood processions. The church has been restored, and the front entrance proudly bears the church's name in Polish, a striking sight to thousands who pass the church daily on interstate highway 70.

"Since I come here," Father Mucha reported in 1985 in his rich Polish accent, "we bury many of the pioneer parishioners. And we welcome ninety newcomers since martial law [was] declared in Poland in 1981. We have comforted them and they have rejuvenated St. Joseph's."