Slovaks on the Hudson

Among the descendants of the Slavic immigrants to the United States today, only the Poles outnumber the Slovaks, but the Slovak presence in this country has been largely unnoticed and unstudied. This book traces the evolution of one Slovak Catholic community in Yonkers, New York, over the course of the last century by focusing on the role of the Church of the Most Holy Trinity, the single most important institution in the local Slovak Catholic community. The church served not only as a religious center but also as a social and cultural focal point, and it formed an indispensable link between the local Slovak Catholic community and an extensive network of national fraternal organizations. The history of this Slovak national parish is inextricably linked with the history of the whole Catholic community in Yonkers. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, repeated waves of Catholic immigrants transformed the city into a microcosm of the Catholic Church in urban America. For that reason the history of the Church of the Most Holy Trinity has been placed in this larger context. Because Yonkers was also a quintessential industrial city filled with smokestack industries, a sub