Lost Twin Cities: St. Austin Catholic Church in north Minneapolis

In the late 1930s, one of the strangest churches ever built in Minnesota began to take shape for the parishioners of St. Austin Catholic Church in north Minneapolis. It was a high, narrow building, faced in white stucco, minimally ornamented and formed by a series of steep parabolic arches of the kind favored by the great Catalan architect Antoni Gaudi. An asymmetric bell tower pierced by another set of parabolic arches rose from the rear of the church, where an attached two-story parish house sported curving walls and windows. St. Austin’s pastor, the Rev. James Troy, called his church a “cosmopolitan composite.”