CAMBRIDGE — Twenty-four years ago, Luz Flores got a first look at her family’s new home in St. Patrick’s Place and couldn’t believe her good fortune: an airy three-bedroom apartment in a former Catholic church, stained glass and chandeliers still accenting the entryway.
Flores, then a 46-year-old Filene’s Basement warehouse worker, soon fell in love with her new neighbors in the affordable-housing complex, too, a quiet and supportive group of working-class families from diverse backgrounds. “I never want to move from here,” she told a reporter in 1994.
Now 70, Flores was still living there last Saturday when she spotted a fire consuming a neighboring building from her corner-unit window. Before any smoke alarms went off, Flores’s shrieks alerted her neighbors, all of whom made it out safely before St. Patrick’s caught fire, too.
They lost nearly everything: photo albums and immigration papers, laptops and baby blankets, early Christmas gifts and prepaid money orders, too. Keith Griffin, a 44-year-old father of six and junk-removal worker, wished he could run back inside for the urn holding his father’s ashes.
But as they took stock of their losses this week, a number of St. Patrick’s Place residents said the hardest thing to lose was the close-knit community of neighbors broken up suddenly by the fire.
Officials do not know yet whether St. Patrick’s — one of the first Catholic churches anywhere in the country to be converted into affordable housing — can be salvaged, but they said it could be years, not months, before anyone can live there again. So they are working to find the 50 displaced St. Pat’s residents other subsidized apartments around Cambridge, probably far apart from each other.
“That’s the sad part,” said Marcia Jones, a resident for 20 years. She told herself she was OK losing photos — “we’ll just take new pictures,” she said, managing a laugh — and her clothing, too. But she is heartbroken over the loss of her apartment community, the laughter in the laundry room, the stories and smiles shared in the hallway. When the fire broke out, she was playing backgammon with an 8-year-old from next door, so close she considers him a grandson.
“My neighbors, man, we’re a family,” said Jones, a former crossing guard and cafeteria worker who lives on disability. “I love my neighbors.”
The 10-alarm fire, which investigators believe was accidental, spread quickly in the densely packed Wellington-Harrington neighborhood on a windy afternoon, striking seven buildings and nine cars in just four minutes. In all, 18 buildings were affected, and more than 120 people were displaced.
Many of them will be able to return. But the hardest hit by the fire were “the most vulnerable in the neighborhood,” the low- and moderate-income renters at St. Patrick’s, said Deborah Ruhe, executive director of Just-A-Start, the nonprofit community development corporation that redeveloped and owns the former church. Some were refugees who had already survived war or natural disaster elsewhere.
Coming out of a temporary relief center at City Hall two days after the fire, St. Patrick’s residents Hewan Mesmer and Zeinat Ibrahim clutched each other as they spoke to reporters. “I’ve been through so much in my life, that this is just another thing to keep me going as a stronger person,” said Mesmer, a 23-year-old who works for Dana-Farber, and who had lived at St. Patrick’s most of her life. “It’s more about the memories and the people.”
“I’m very thankful that this did not happen at night, while we were sleeping,” said Ibrahim, a single parent who works two jobs. Her closeness with Mesmer gave the impression of mother and daughter, but they were neighbors. Though they trace their roots to two countries that have frequently clashed, they feel like family.
Mesmer’s father, who fled Eritrea, found a haven at St. Patrick’s, steering three children through the Cambridge schools and on to college. Ibrahim had fled Ethiopia’s civil war and come to Cambridge seeking safety and stability; at St. Pat’s, she found community.
“Our kids grew up together, from middle school to high school to college,” she said. “I feel like we are one.”
The residents said they also appreciated how carefully the building was managed. They liked its striking design — an unusual Spanish Mission-style church, built in 1909 — and were grateful to live in an affordable complex with family-sized units, a rarity.
When the church opened a century ago, at a cost of $25,000, the Globe described the building at the corner of Berkshire and York streets as “a beautiful structure, simple in lines and imposing.”
Serving a blue-collar neighborhood of Irish and Italian families — the area’s many Portuguese residents worshipped at one of two other nearby parishes — the church thrived for decades, with its own bowling league and weekly Mass attendance that hit 3,000.
By 1989, when Cardinal Bernard Law performed the final Mass, attendance had dipped to 150. Two years later, the archdiocese sold the property — the church and three adjacent buildings — to Just-A-Start for $250,000, an unusual move in an era before widespread parish closures. The nonprofit put $4 million into redevelopment, drawing public and private funds. Far from wary about affordable housing, neighbors embraced the result, thankful for the landmark’s preservation.
Of the 32 units in the complex, only the 16 in the church itself were permanently destroyed. In the days since, residents have huddled at a nearby hotel, while Just-A-Start and the city work to rehouse them.
On a recent evening, Jones — known to neighbors as Cia — sat in the lobby near a dinner spread donated by an Islamic aid organization, hugging friends as they passed. She had just learned that she could move into a vacant apartment in one of the surviving St. Pat’s buildings next door. But her beloved neighbors would scatter.
Jones touched hands with Sahida Akter, and beamed to learn the 33-year-old from Bangladesh and her family would move just a few blocks away. “Honey, I’m still going to see you,” she promised. “We’re still going to be neighbors.”
Then Flores appeared; she had been in the hospital for two days, treated for stress and cardiac symptoms after she fled the fire without her medication.
“Oh my!” Jones said.
“Oh, Cia!” Flores said. They shared a tender moment. Flores had lost her car, too, flooded in the small parking garage beneath the church, her only means of getting to her job in a Waltham nursing-home kitchen.
She might be forced to retire, and she had just learned of an apartment lead in North Cambridge, which seemed so far. “I don’t know anybody there,” she said, wishing she could preserve the community she had cherished for 24 years.
“I loved that place,” she said, catching herself, not ready yet to talk about it in the past tense. “I love it.”
Eric Moskowitz can be reached at eric.moskowitz@globe.com. Follow him on Twitter @GlobeMoskowitz.