Shrine of the Sacred Heart

Story

The Shrine of the Sacred Heart is a Roman Catholic parish established in 1899 in the Mount Pleasant/Columbia Heights neighborhood of Washington D.C.. The parish church is a large domed Byzantine structure modeled after the Cathedral in Ravenna, Italy.The current church is actually the second that the Shrine of the Sacred Heart community has called home. The original red brick structure was dedicated in 1901, and the current structure in 1922. Both buildings were influenced by the City Beautiful architectural movement which overtook Washington from 1901 to 1910.The parish was originally part of the Archdiocese of Baltimore before the establishment of the Diocese of Washington in 1923. The Diocese was elevated to an Archdiocese in 1939.HistoryThe church is located at 3211 Sacred Heart Way, nestled in between the Mt. Pleasant and Columbia Heights regions of the District of Columbia, just off 16th Street Northwest, for a long time a de facto dividing line in the tensely racially divided Washington in the decades after the city's 1968 riots.The original parish church was located at the corner of 14th Street and Park Road, Northwest, and the current church was established in the 1920s. The building was designed by the architectural firm of Murphy and Olmsted, and the architectural sculptor was John Joseph Earley. Incorporated into the design is Earley's innovative technique of beautifying concrete by infusing the mixture with fragmented quartz stones, then scraping away the surface of the concrete during drying to further expose the stones as the concrete sets. The same technique can be seen in Earley's work at Meridian Hill Park, a half-mile south. This technique is today known as the Mo-Sai Technique.