Ad orientem

The big 360° panorama I did yesterday didn’t turn out properly, and I’m not publishing it. I did salvage a piece of it, above. It’s the altar of St. Anthony Church in Wichita, east of the central business district.1

St. Boniface parish was erected in 1886 to serve German-speaking Catholics in the Wichita area, and a wooden church was built the next year. Franciscans took up residence around 1890. When a more permanent church was built during the first decade of the 20th century, it was named for the Franciscan St. Anthony of Padua. Nowadays the best place in the area to find German Catholics is western Sedgwick county, and St. Anthony has become a center of Vietnamese Catholic activity.

Update: Here’s the quick and dirty version of the panorama, using five images taken with a fisheye lens rather than 37 at the wide end of a cheap but sharp zoom. It’s much smaller and less detailed than the large one, but it gives you an idea of what the interior of the church looks like. I hope to return soon to the church, preferably on an overcast day, and make a full-size panorama that meets my standards.


St. Anthony Catholic Church, Wichita

Here’s the exterior.

Notes

  1. The curved lines are a consequence of the picture’s origin as part of a spherical panorama. It’s also much reduced in size; the full-sized panorama, printed at 300 DPI, would have been eight feet wide and four feet high. The portion here would have been close to three feet tall. Right-click and open in a new window to see at full (but still reduced) size.