Sacred Heart Roman Catholic Church, Convent and Rectory

The Sacred Heart Roman Catholic Church complex is architecturally significant as a fine Victorian ecclesiastical complex illustrating a variety of architectural styles. The church is an excellent and little altered example of Italianate design and is the only Italianate style church in the city. The church complex is historically significant for its associations with Detroit's ethnic history having originally served a German immigrant population and later the city's oldest black Catholic congregation. The church is one of the earlier designs of German-born architect Peter J. Diederichs who later designed a number of houses, commercial blocks and churches for Detroit's large German-American community. His High Victorian Gothic style St. Mary's Roman Catholic church (1885) on St. Antoine Street in Greektown has recently been determined to be eligible for listing in the National Register.

The Sacred Heart Church Complex is located about one mile north of downtown Detroit next to the Chrysler Freeway in a cleared urban renewal area. The church, convent and rectory, virtually the only buildings remaining in the area, are surrounded on three sides by blocks of cleared land criss-crossed by old streets. The church, built in 1875, is a two-story, brick, pedimented-end-gable-roofed, Italianate bracketed structure with a projecting entrance pavilion capped with a wooden belfry and spire. The building has roundhead fenestration with stone sills, keystones and raised brick surrounds. The walls are articulated with brick pilasters at the corners and between the six bays of two-story-high nave windows. The seventh bay on each of the sides, which houses the sacristy and service rooms flanking the sanctuary, is projected forward about twelve inches to denote the end of the nave and to visually terminate the building. They are pedimented and utilize narrow paired windows located above a projecting brick vestibule addition. The red-brick building is handsomely trimmed with a fine bracketed wooden cornice treatment set above a course of brick pendent corbelling. The cornice is articulated by oversized, paired brackets at each pilaster strip. The octagonal, wooden, louvered belfry rises from the brick tower above a smaller scaled wooden bracketed cornice of the same design as the main eaves cornice. An interesting feature of the tower cornice is the small semi-circular break in the center of each side which softens the visual transition from the square tower to the octagonal belfry. The belfry is surmounted by an eight-sided slate spire with louvered dormers and contrasting corner ribbing. There is a simple cross at the apex of the spire.