First Croatian Catholic Parish in America

In eighteen ninety-four, Croatian immigrants on Pittsburgh's North Side established the first Croatian Catholic parish in America. Within a decade, a daughter parish on Troy Hill built a Romanesque church that became the spiritual and social anchor of a community that had crossed an ocean to escape religious, economic, and political repression. Pittsburgh's mills and its familiar industrial geography drew thousands of Croatians, and Saint Nicholas Roman Catholic Croatian Church held that neighborhood together for more than a century.

In two thousand thirteen, despite years of organized preservation efforts, the church and its grotto were demolished. What stood here was not just a building but a record of where Croatian American identity in this country began.