For more than 60 years, the "little pink church" was the spiritual heart of Milwaukee's Italian community. But the church — Blessed Virgin of Pompeii Catholic Church, 419 N. Jackson St. — was also in the path of "progress," a dangerous place to be in Milwaukee in the 1960s. 

Built in 1904, the church was the center of Italian Catholic life in the Third Ward for decades. But by the 1960s, urban renewal and freeway construction had left the church — known for the pink bricks it was built from and the marble statue of an angel that stood watch atop its steeple — isolated in a sea of weeds and parking lots.