Between 1978 and 1982, the Mile Square City of Hoboken, New Jersey, experienced a wave of residential building fires, many of them suspected to have been intentionally set. More than fifty people died, most of them children. Amongst the Hoboken residents who lived through that era, there is an unshakeable belief that the majority of the fires were arson, intended to drive out low-income and indigent residents so that developers could create expensive apartments, condominiums, and brownstones. It was popularly known as "gentrification arson."

This project seeks to remedy the lack of attention or public acknowledgment of these tragedies for those who still bear the emotional and physical scars through a series of events designed for storytelling, remembering, and memorializing. The Church knows how to create space for ritual, mourning, and remembrance that lead to healing. Preparing a liturgical framework set in the streets of this compact city is also a way of making God known. Some anthropological studies have led researchers to believe that early faith grew out of memorializing the dead: "The ceremonies our early ancestors enacted reflexively in the face of death, they speculate, were the soil in which a sense of the holy grew." This project will have succeeded beyond imagining if those who participate in its three parts experience something holy in the process.