Stephen Rynn, the executive director of the mission, a social service agency of the New York Roman Catholic archdiocese, said the building was "a physical manifestation of charity" for the thousands of homeless girls it once housed.
The archdiocese gave construction crews the green light to begin removing the building's ornate, neo-Gothic facade, and yesterday morning workers sliced off the spires and copper crucifix on the church rooftop.
It is not, however, the first residential apartment building the archdiocese has undertaken.
The archdiocese still owns the building and leases it to the school for $1 a year.
Others say the archdiocese should sell the building and use the money to help settle the pending sex abuse cases.
Yet 10 years ago, after concluding that 600,000 people here had no convenient place to worship, the archdiocese began an ambitious building program.
In addition to the building the Archdiocese also took over one worshipper, a determined lady who maintains that, as she has paid life rent for one of the pews, the church is her place of worship, Catholics or no Catholics.
Inside, it's easy to imagine how the cathedral's vast dimensions would seem otherworldly to the medieval mind.Construction began in 1248, as the archdiocese needed a larger building to serve the flood of visitors that poured into the city after it acquired the remains of the Three Magi, Christianity's first pilgrims.
Some parishioners have sued the archdiocese, arguing that church buildings belong to local Catholics, not to their leaders.The occupations put the archdiocese in an impossible position: it knows better than to yank people out of their churches by force.
"What is this, pedophile insurance?" "If the archdiocese is going to sell off buildings," she said, "which buildings, whose buildings?" Will they be schools or churches?
