From School to Shul by the Shore

A Story of Two Religious Buildings in Belmont Heights

By Maureen Neeley

Shul-By-The-Shore has found a new home in the former St. Bartholomew’s multipurpose space built to serve the students at the adjacent parish elementary school.

This building at Tremont and 4^th Street is all that is left from the St. Bartholomew Catholic Grammar School and convent. Built in 1951 to serve the growing post-war population of Catholics in southeast Long Beach, the school comprised two buildings on the northwest corner of Fourth and Park. Graduates of St. Bart’s remember hanging over the playground fence to watch the Red Cars rumble past on their way to Orange County cities.

On the same site was the convent, which housed the teaching order of the Sisters of the Immaculate Heart of Mary (IHM). This order of nuns was already teaching at St. Anthony’s elementary and high school, as well as at St. Matthew’s elementary school. Mother Mary Eucharia, mother general of the order housed in Hollywood, would hand-select the faculty who would live at the convent serving St. Bartholomew school. In the early ‘70s, after Vatican II, the IHM order would re-evaluate their mission with many of the sisters choosing to forgo convent life for small communal apartments, teaching for social work, etc.

The changes to the teaching staff necessitated a re-evaluation of parochial schools throughout the Los Angeles basin. St. Bartholomew’s Grammar School shut its doors in the mid-1970s. The school buildings plus the convent were demolished a few years later to make way for the Bridgeport Condominium complex (c 1981), which is still there today.

The single remaining building at Tremont and 4^th Street had served the school as a multi-purpose center. Upon closure of the school, this became classrooms for Religious Education (aka “CCD”) for generations of youngsters from the mid-1970s through the 2010’s, when the decision was made to sell the property.