Most Holy Redeemer: Southwest Detroit's Cathedral Parish

At Junction Street in Southwest Detroit stands Most Holy Redeemer, once estimated as the largest Roman Catholic parish in North America. The Redemptorist fathers founded the parish in eighteen eighty to serve Irish immigrants working in Detroit's tobacco factories. By the nineteen twenties, with the Ford River Rouge Complex drawing thousands more workers to the neighborhood, the parish commissioned a grand church in the Roman basilica style.

It opened in nineteen twenty-three, seating fourteen hundred, its windows made by Boston artist Charles Jay Connick and its floors tiled by Mary Chase Perry Stratton's Pewabic Pottery. Just after World War Two, thousands of people attended its Sunday Masses. The surrounding West Vernor and Junction commercial district anchored the neighborhood for Irish immigrants and later arrivals through the middle of the twentieth century.