St. Peter’s is a Catholic church and orphanage whose grounds form a conspicuous enclave on the western edge of Newark’s Weequahic neighborhood. Its tall steeple rises above the surrounding streets, while the fenced compound contains a convent, a school, a residence for orphans, and an unusual working farm. To the Jewish child observing it from beyond its gates, the place is at once an ordinary institution with its own daily life and an alien territory: close enough to become part of neighborhood memory, yet set apart by architecture, religion, and boundary fences.

Setting and Architecture

The church occupied roughly three square blocks near the heart of the neighborhood. Its bell tower and still taller steeple, capped by a cross, stood above the telephone wires; the narrator recalls that no local building matched their height until the route down Lyons Avenue reached Beth Israel Hospital, where neighborhood boys were born and circumcised. Two smaller steeples flanked the tower. The child narrator avoided looking closely at the carved saints on the stone and regarded the narrow stained-glass windows as telling a story he did not want to know. The church’s height and religious imagery made it an unmistakable landmark, but also marked a spiritual world from which the surrounding Jewish community felt distant.

A small rectory, the church, and the orphanage belonged to an older landscape than the neighborhood around them. The buildings inside the black iron railings dated from the latter part of the previous century, decades before houses appeared and the western edge of Weequahic took shape as Newark’s Jewish frontier. That contrast of age and settlement makes the compound feel like a remnant of an earlier order embedded within a newer residential district. Its enclosing railings gave the grounds a defined, separate character rather than making them an extension of the neighboring streets.

The Orphanage and Its Residents

Behind the church stood a grammar school serving about a hundred orphans, alongside a smaller number of local Catholic children. German nuns ran the school and orphanage; a monsignor oversaw the institution, assisted by a younger priest. A convent stood beside the children’s residence, both buildings simple and red-brick. At the end of summer days, the narrator sometimes saw white girls and boys, roughly six to fourteen years old, sitting outside on the fire escape. He does not remember encountering the children elsewhere in groups, or seeing them move freely through the streets as neighborhood children did.

The child narrator’s apprehension came partly from the children’s circumstances: they were said to be neglected and indigent. The nuns’ religious dress also seemed unsettling to Jewish children raised in households that were otherwise tolerant. In a family story, the narrator’s brother, seeing two nuns approach when he was small, called excitedly to his mother, “Look, Ma—the nuts.” The remembered joke captures the mixture of childish distance and casual familiarity surrounding the institution: its residents and caretakers were visible, but remained outsiders in the neighborhood’s imagination.

At the public elementary school less than a mile away, rumors circulated that nuns struck the least capable pupils’ hands with wooden rulers and that an assistant priest beat boys for especially serious offenses. These are reported as neighborhood rumors, not as events the narrator witnessed. The reported punishment was linked to the same whip used by the farmer on the pair of swaybacked workhorses. The stories connected the school’s discipline to the laboring animals on the grounds, giving the institution’s adult authority a harsh presence in local lore.

Farm, Horses, and the Grounds Beyond the Fence

Behind the residence hall lay a truck farm, an unexpected stretch of cultivated land in an industrial city of nearly half a million people. The produce fed the orphans, roughly a dozen nuns, the monsignor, and the assistant priest. A resident German farmer worked the land with the children’s help. The narrator is uncertain whether the farmer was named Thimmes or whether that was the monsignor’s name, and remembers the farm as a place where the institution depended on its own work as well as its religious and educational life.

The horses that pulled the plow for spring planting occasionally wandered across the farm to a small wooded meadow at its southern edge. Their heads appeared over the gate backing onto Goldsmith Avenue, where the narrator later watched a dice game. The combination of working farmland and a wooded boundary was unusual in the built-up city. The horses were familiar neighborhood sights, even though the farm itself belonged to the enclosed world of St. Peter’s. Children gave the mud-spattered animals the names Omaha and Whirlaway, borrowing the names of celebrated Kentucky Derby winners.

Boundaries and Neighborhood Memory

A seven-foot chain-link fence edged the playground on the near side of Goldsmith Avenue; on the far side, a wire fence on posts marked the wooded edge of the farm. With few nearby houses and little traffic, this quiet strip between the playground and the cultivated grounds offered cover for neighborhood men to gather and shoot dice. The compound’s boundary did not seal it off completely: the gate, meadow, and horses made the edge a place of contact, though one still organized by fences and watched from a safe distance.

After seeing his cousin Alvin win money at the dice game, the boy took the longer way home down Goldsmith Avenue and Hobson Street to look closely at the horses. He stopped back from the fence, noticed that the chain had been unlooped and the gate could be opened, and imagined letting the animals run free. The impulse combined curiosity with spite, but fear of being dragged into the orphanage by their teeth sent him racing back toward the familiar shops and houses of Chancellor Avenue. In this episode, St. Peter’s is not merely a landmark in the background: its gate makes the boundary between the child’s neighborhood and the world he fears a physical choice, briefly open and then hastily refused.