15 Facts About Patrick Keely

Patrick Charles Keely was an Irish-American architect based in Brooklyn, New York, and Providence, Rhode Island.

Patrick Keely was a prolific designer of nearly 600 churches and hundreds of other institutional buildings for the Roman Catholic Church or Roman Catholic patrons in the eastern United States and Canada, particularly in New York City, Boston and Chicago in the later half of the 19th century.

Patrick Keely designed every 19th-century Catholic cathedral in New England.

Patrick Keely emigrated to the United States, landing at Castle Garden in Manhattan in 1842, and settling in Brooklyn.

Patrick Keely arrived at a time when Catholicism in the United States was expanding from its initial footholds in Baltimore, New York City and Boston.

Together with Patrick Keely, he worked out a plan for a Gothic church possessing pointed arches, pinnacles, and a few buttresses.

The stained glass was by the Morgan Brothers, thus establishing a business relationship with Patrick Keely that carried through a number of projects.

Thereafter, Patrick Keely effectively became the in-house architect for the Roman Catholic archdioceses and was approached from all sides with requests for designs of churches and other necessary structures for an expanding religious life.

In Brooklyn alone there was a great wave of Catholic settlers for whom churches were urgently needed and Patrick Keely was the only one thought of to do the work.

St Brigid's on E 8th St in Manhattan was built in 1848 to a Carpenter Gothic design by Patrick Keely, who carved the five-pinnacle reredos, organ case, and wooden altar himself.

Patrick Keely designed the Jesuit Church of the Immaculate Conception in the South End of Boston in the style of Italian Renaissance Revival in 1858, as well as its walnut case holding the organ pipe work.

Patrick Keely designed the Jesuits Church of the Gesu, the college chapel for the College Sainte-Marie de Montreal.

St Mary's, Charlestown was commissioned by pastor John McMahon, the younger brother of Bishop Lawrence Stephen McMahon of the Diocese of Hartford, for whom Patrick Keely had built St Joseph's Cathedral.

Patrick Keely worked throughout the eastern United States and Canada, primarily in the industrial mill towns and cities of the state of New York and New England, principally a designer of Roman Catholic churches or institutional buildings.

Patrick Keely died on August 11,1896, after a long illness, while still directing the completion of several churches with his son-in-law, Thomas Houghton.