Lithuanian immigrants, Mr. And Mrs. Antanes Vasis, stand in St. George Church on the last day it was open for its last mass.
In the working-class hall of Fame, the “Greatest Generation” came out of the great migrations of working-class people settling in industrial towns and cities of the Northeast and Midwest. Beginning in the 1880s the generation of varied ethnicities, spanned the entire American modern labor history from its earliest struggles through its peak and strength after WWII, and the great decline in American industry that they helped build, after 1978.
Both Black migration from the American south and Eastern European migration which was through the roof between 1880 and 1920, when they settled in the cities, working in industry, often heavy industry, and, on such a large scale, that in certain American cities, these huge populations, in ethnic enclaves, rivaled their cities back home.
Some remain, but many ethnic working-class neighborhoods, have vanished, but were the norm for centuries. Each working-class neighborhood had a dominant ethnic group and each ethnic group had their religion church which they built with their labor, pennies and dollars. Before the ethnics aged and passed away, even just 10 years ago, you could go anywhere in the city, talking to people on their porches, or, and their little social clubs in abandoned lots, the remains few bars, or down at the lake, and have the greatest conversations about the labor history I just described, without any sort of academics, just living history, even the history after 1978, when it all began to go to hell.
Amongst these groups Lithuanians were not as great in numbers compared to others but had their largest presence in NYC, Pennsylvania and Illinois. In this town, their most well-known and largest neighborhood was along Superior Avenue from East 55th to East 79th Street, where, their church, St. George was at the corner of East 65th and Superior. Quickly the original 35 acres of farms that became this Lithuanian enclave, were developed into housing, stores and churches.
In 2009-20010 the diocese began to close 25 Catholic inner-city ethnic churches and St. George Lithuanian Church was one of them. This shot was taken in October, 2009, after the last mass in St. George, when the bishop came out and officially shut it down. Antanes Oasis worked at a bronze foundry on East 55th until he retired. Like most ethnics they eventually left the old neighborhood and bought a small home in the suburbs that had filled with the same sort of folks, like where they Parma, which had huge Eastern European residents especially formUkraine, Poland and
In January, 2010, he died.