The church now known as St. Boniface started life as St. Aloysius and was created in 1852 for German and Irish Catholics in the Cumminsville area. According to the Bicentennial Guide to Cincinnati, German members of the church were mostly small businessmen and craftsmen, while the Irish parishioners were mainly laborers. Additionally, the German members belonged to many German language societies and organizations from which the Irish congregation was excluded.
As a result, tensions began to heat up and the congregation was divided by ethnicity in 1861. In the split, the Irish got the church building, which was renamed St. Patrick Roman Catholic Church, while the Germans got $1,500 and the priest. With this money and the leadership from a well known priest, the Germans built a new church on the corner of Blue Rock and Lakeman Streets and dedicated it as St. Boniface Roman Catholic Church in 1864, adding both a parish school and a convent for the nuns who taught there, the Sisters of Charity. The congregation outgrew this space in the 1920s and built a new church in the Romanesque style in 1927 which features Venetian mosaics and Italian marble.
Bibliographical Sources:
The Bicentennial Guide to Greater Cincinnati: A Portrait of Two Hundred Years, by Geoffrey J. Giglierano, Deborah A. Overmeyer, with Frederic L. Propas, The Cincinnati Historical Society, 1988, page 273
