A Mass will be celebrated on St. Brigid’s Day, Thursday, Feb. 1, at St. Brigid-St. Emeric Parish Church, 123 Avenue B, at East 8th Street, Manhattan, at 7 p.m. Parishioners and friends will gather after Mass in the parish center downstairs for a party with food, drinks and music. Construction of St. Brigid’s, often called the “Famine church,” began in 1848, and later this year the 175th anniversary of its dedication by Bishop John Hughes, on Dec. 2, 1849, will be marked with a special Mass. St. Brigid’s was shuttered by the Archdiocese of New York in the early 2000s, but parishioners and preservationists resisted the plan to demolish the church. In 2008, the Archdiocese announced an “unexpected but very welcome gift,” an anonymous donation of $20 million for the parish, of which half would go to restore the church itself. The restored St. Brigid’s, now merged with nearby St. Emeric Parish, reopened in 2013.
