St. Jerome's Catholic Church was built in 1899-1900 to the designs of the architectural firm Delhi and Howard. The cost of the building was $100,000, a considerable sum for the turn of the 20th century. The Italianate / Baroque Revival building can house a crowd of more than 1400 parishioners. The church is a part of the Mott Haven Historic District, which was designated in 1969. The main thoroughfare of the district, Alexander Avenue (where the church sits on the corner with 138th Street) was once known as "Irish Fifth Avenue."

St. Jerome’s Roman Catholic church complex occupies the whole eastern blockfront of Alexander Avenue between East 137th Street and East 138th Street and is dominated by the church’s corner tower with its colonnaded belfry and octagonal dome. The mostly Irish-American congregation of St. Jerome formed in 1869, and built the red-brick Victorian Gothic style school building at the southern end of the block first, in 1871, followed by the neo-Grec style rectory next door. The church itself was the last in the complex to be erected and was completed in 1898 in the Renaissance Revival style to the designs of the Manhattan-based firm Dehli & Howard. The church is an outstanding example of its style, with finely articulated facades of rusticated buff brick ornamented with robust Italian Renaissance-inspired architectural forms such as broken pediments, Ionic and Tuscan columns and elaborate cornices and entablatures. A statue of Jerome, the 4th-century scholar saint, sits at the corner of the church.

Though the name of this business is advertised as plural bowling alley(s), further research suggests no other locations existed and the narrow width of the buildings makes it seem unlikely that this operation had more than one or two lanes.