St. Vincent de Paul Roman Catholic Church

St. Vincent de Paul was founded as Milwaukee’s fourth Polish Roman Catholic parish in 1888. It was the first of three “daughter” parishes of St. Hyacinth after St. Hyacinth Pastor Jacek “Hyacinth” Gulski moved to divide his overcrowded parish. Father Wincenty “Vincent” Lewandowski was the founding pastor, serving until 1899. The parish chose to build its schoolhouse first in 1888, which served as a temporary church until the actual one was built. The Romanesque Revival church, built in 1900, was designed by the European-born Milwaukee Pole, Bernard Kołpacki, the “South Side’s favorite architect.”

The City of Milwaukee regards St. Vincent de Paul as “Remarkable because of its soaring twin, Polish-inspired Renaissance Revival style steeples, this very important ethnic structure is pivotal to the architectural character of the south side neighborhood that developed around the turn of the [20th] century.” The church nave features two large stained-glass windows of St. Dominic and St. Vincent de Paul in its transepts, and several surviving frescoes painted in the 1920s by the Polish-American ecclesial artist Bruno Liskowiak and his sons Witold and Edward. The church became a Milwaukee County Landmark in 2025.

In its almost 140-year history, the parish has served Polish immigrants, Polish-Americans, and now Latino immigrants and Latino-Americans. Two notable parishioners in the parish history include the first Polish-American congressman (1919-1923), John Casimir Kleczka (1885-1959), and the longtime South Side congressman (1949-1983) and Chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, Clement John Zablocki (1912-1983). Zablocki played St. Vincent de Paul’s organ as music director prior to his political career. Today, the parish is still the spiritual home to Americans of Polish descent, as well as newer Latino families.