Sign of the times and the Catholic churches of Nordeast

Your correspondent revisits the venerable Minneapolis neighborhood.

Alert readers will recall my visit to Northeast Minneapolis last July and the accompanying slideshow video. The video includes a number of Northeast Catholic churches that I photographed last July. Today, I visited two more.

My visit today began on a less happy note. As reported by WCCO,

Police say thieves rammed a car into a northeast Minneapolis tobacco shop early Sunday in order to gain access to the shop and rob it.

The crash happened just before 4 a.m. at the Smoke Shop on the 2200 block of University Avenue Northeast. The Minneapolis Police Department said five or six people were inside the vehicle that hit the business. They left in a second vehicle after taking an unknown amount of product from the store.  

WCCO

The destroyed front door was quickly boarded up. Here’s how it looked early Monday afternoon.

The white sign taped on the plywood informs patrons that the business is open, but only accessible through the next-door deli. With retail sales of marijuana coming on August 1, look for more such brazen robberies, or heavily fortified buildings.

Recognizing the address, the Smoke Shop sits only one block away from one of the many ethnic Catholic churches in the neighborhood, St. John the Baptist Byzantine Catholic Church:

This Eastern Rite church serves a congregation first formed in 1906. The current building dates from 1927. Two parishioners invited me inside for a personal tour of the sanctuary. Here is a picture of the altar.

Six blocks to the south sits St. Boniface Catholic Church.

Founded by German immigrants in 1858, the current building dates from 1929. Every week, mass is offered in French, Sunday at noon,

So many treasures, so close to home.