BAY AREA QUAKE : QUAKE DIARY : No Prayer of Resurrection for St. Patrick’s Church

If you go to where Main Street meets Freedom Boulevard, there, across the street from Morland Notre Dame Catholic School and the Taco Burrito restaurant, you’ll see St. Patrick’s Church.

It’s an immense red-brick building with a 60-foot-tall steeple that dominates the downtown skyline.

The church was built in 1903. Each wall has large stained glass windows that depict biblical scenes, including Jesus on the cross and Jesus rising from the grave. In the morning and in the late afternoon, when the sun hits the glass at just the right angle, beautiful colored lights rain down on the wooden pews and on the huge white-and-beige marble altar.

For about 13 years, while growing up in this small agricultural town about 16 miles south of Santa Cruz, I--along with about 4,000 other parishioners--attended services in this church each weekend.

This is where both my sisters were married and where my youngest brother was baptized. This is where I entered the confessional every few months to tell my transgressions to a priest sitting behind a black partition.

But this week when I returned to survey the damage that the Oct. 17 quake dealt my hometown, I found that St. Patrick’s Church had suffered a deadly blow.

Two-inch-wide cracks run horizontally along the outside walls and gaping holes remain where bricks have been shaken loose. The steeple teeters on a crumbling foundation and city workers have cordoned off the block for fear that more bricks will fall during an aftershock.

If you ask the sisters at the Notre Dame Convent, they will tell you that the parish is doing everything it can to save the stained glass, which somehow remained in one piece. But they will also tell you that the church ultimately will be demolished.

“People have been calling up and weeping about the condition of the church,” said Sister Elizabeth Macke.

When Los Angeles was hit by a quake two years ago, I interviewed people who had been displaced, collected damage estimates and wrote about the destruction.

But reporting the destruction in Watsonville was different.

This is my hometown, my old stomping grounds, and that made the damage to buildings--such as the church--much more devastating.

When Los Angeles gets me down, I go to Watsonville. It is my personal retreat, and that made the pain people suffered a personal affront, like an insult to my friends and family.

This city of about 29,500 was hit hard. One woman was killed and about 80 people were hurt. Nearly 200 homes were destroyed, including seven that burned to the ground immediately after the quake. By Tuesday of this week about 500 people throughout the city were sleeping in tents or on cots at convention halls and at the city’s National Guard Armory.

If you head south along Main Street about three blocks you will see a three-story department store on your right. That is Ford’s, where I worked as a stock boy for three summers when I was home from college. Ford’s and just about every other business along Main Street’s mile-long commercial strip were cordoned off while business owners and building inspectors decided which buildings could be salvaged.

City officials say that every unreinforced masonry building that was built in the early 1900s may have to be demolished. That would include almost half of the buildings on the commercial strip.

Go north on Main Street and then east on Freedom Boulevard for about two blocks and you will see Callaghan Park on your right. It is a triangular, one-acre lot where the Rev. Jesse Jackson spoke three years ago at a rally to support striking workers in a bitter 18-month dispute that nearly forced the city’s largest frozen-food plant into foreclosure.

The park was home this week to about 20 families who had pitched tents on the grass and huddled around fires in rusty metal barrels. Most of the families were working-class Latinos who could not afford a hotel as an escape from the rain and cold weather.

Continuing north on Main Street about three miles, across from the Starlight Drive-In, you will find Ramsey Park, where the National Guard had set up dozens of tents on a soccer field near the picnic area.

Over on East Beach Street about 200 families were living in tents and sleeping on blankets on the practice fields at Watsonville High School, where years ago I used to run wind sprints during soccer practice. When the rain turned the field into a muddy mess, the city moved the people to a hall at the Santa Cruz County Fairgrounds.

Head north on Brennan Street near East Lake Boulevard and you will see that almost every third house has been shaken off of its foundation. Most of these single-story, wood-frame houses were built in the 1950s and 1960s. The houses that were hardest hit were splintered at the base and sat lopsided on their foundations with their windows boarded up.

But if you talk to the people you will see that Watsonville has dealt well with the situation.

Talk to Roberto Ramirez, who was forced out of his two-room apartment on Front Street and was living with his wife and two children in a tent on a vacant lot across the street. He tells how complete strangers have been driving up to his tent all week to offer him food and clothes.

He doesn’t mind the rain too much and has been able to keep his family warm by lighting a fire in a metal barbecue pit.

“It’s what God commands,” he said in Spanish. “And with him you can’t argue.”

Talk to Cruz Gomez, director of the Migrant Media Education Project on East Lake Street, where about 100 volunteers have been passing out donated food to at least 200 people each day. She will tell you that the people who are displaced are desperate to find permanent shelter but “most seem to be reasonably together considering what they’ve been through.”

Steven Taylor, manager of Taylor’s Office Supplies on Main Street, will tell you that merchants have been helping one another collect the spilled merchandise and clean up broken glass and other debris.

“Most people have pulled together and the tempers are good,” he said.

He tells you that although many windows broke during the quake there was almost no looting. “Both my front windows were broken and I didn’t board them up until the next day but nothing was taken,” he said.

Now go to East Lake Boulevard, to the Pajaro Show Place, the city’s newest movie theater, and talk to the manager, John Williams. He will tell you that the theater has been closed until building inspectors can determine if it is safe. He will also tell you that each night since the quake he has shown free movies on his color television and videocassette player, which he set up in front of the theater.

He will describe how each night about 60 people have huddled together outside on blankets to watch “Top Gun” and “Who Framed Roger Rabbit?”

“I’m amazed. I really am,” he said. “The people are just outgoingly friendly.”