Brooklyn is the borough of homes and churches. But what is Brooklyn’s most beautiful church? The most beautiful classical church is St. Barbara’s, in Bushwick. The most beautiful Gothic church is St. Augustine’s, at Sixth Avenue and Sterling Place in Park Slope.

In 1886, Father Edward McCarty held a competition seeking “as much novelty as good taste allowed.” Seldom has “good taste” allowed so much novelty as in 1886. The budget – $300,000 – was the largest up to that time for a Catholic church in Brooklyn. The winner was a Brooklyn firm called Parfitt Brothers, one of New York’s great high Victorian firms, known for their houses in the Queen Anne style, in which novelty sometimes rose to sublime goofiness.

So it was with much of what we call “high Victorian Gothic.” Yet in the Parfitts’ use of a novel Gothic for St. Augustine’s, there’s no goofiness at all. In the 1880s, Brooklyn abounded in the “Richardsonian Romanesque,” and I believe the Parfitts had an eye cocked toward Henry Hobson Richardson’s Trinity Church in Boston. Unlike some Brooklyn architects, who copied Richardson wholesale, the Parfitts used the master as a touchstone, transmuting his romantic Romanesque into a strikingly original Gothic. The Parfitts could never have assembled Richardson’s awesome crew of decorators, but St. Augustine’s embellishers were no slouches.

The cornerstone was laid in November 1888; in May 1892, Brooklyn bishop Charles McDonnell dedicated the church. The day after the dedication, the New York Times proclaimed St. Augustine’s “Brooklyn’s Finest Church.”

Father McCarty retained Louis Comfort Tiffany’s firm to decorate the church, though not all of their windows were installed as originally envisioned. Around 1914, Father McCarty (pastor for 49 years) retained Alexander Locke to produce a new set of windows for St. Augustine’s, and it’s these, in concert with the architecture, that make this church an artistic standout. Locke had recently produced splendid windows for Our Lady Queen of All Saints, on Lafayette Avenue in Fort Greene, across the street from the site of Brooklyn’s never-completed Catholic cathedral. That few may recognize Locke’s name only points up the embarrassment of riches in the American decorative arts of that time. For how could an artist of Locke’s caliber not be better known?

He lived nearby, at 46 Montgomery Place, in one of Park Slope’s finest (if not most splendiferous) houses, designed by C.P.H. Gilbert – with lovely Locke windows. Locke apprenticed under the great John La Farge. That La Farge was a key embellisher of Boston’s Trinity helps us to draw a line between that great church and St. Augustine’s. Locke’s windows, in the opalescent manner of Tiffany and La Farge, were completed by 1918 and grace the choir loft, aisles, and clerestories.

The church’s exterior is a complex play of polychromatic geometries created around a dominant New Jersey brownstone. We believe this is Brooklyn’s only Catholic church with brownstone facades. In so many ways, this is a work of stunning originality and power, as great as any cathedral Brooklyn may have built for itself.