North Portland may hold a record as the neighborhood with the most Catholic schools that have come and gone.

In all, 10 institutions have closed since the 1920s. Several school buildings went through multiple phases with different names and partnerships.

Saying that they are tending the legacy, two of the schools that remain in the district - Holy Cross and De La Salle North Catholic - are reaching out to alumni of the many shuttered institutions, including North Catholic High School, which burned in 1970 and was never re-opened.

'I hope we can provide enough connection that the alumni from these schools will support the schools that are surviving,' says Holy Names Sister Mary Ryan, who spent decades as a teacher and principal in the neighborhood. She is now director of development at Holy Cross School. She recently was awarded a lifetime achievement award by St. Mary's Academy for her ministry.

'If people realize that all these schools really impacted this area, and if we raise consciousness about that, it would really help us now, I think,' Sister Mary says. 'Catholic education is broader than the parish; it is broader than the building. It is the legacy that we leave behind and have to nurture. . . . We need to pass on this torch, or it could just go out completely.'

The closing of a school building, Sister Mary recalls, is like a death. She recalls the closure of Assumption School with an abiding pang. She worked there for 15 years and lived in the convent there for decades.

'It was a family there,' she says. 'We didn't have to just call it that for form. That's what it was.'

It is that sadness, nostalgia and conviction that organizers hope to welcome at a reunion set for Saturday, June 28, noon-9 p.m. at Holy Cross School.

'People here loved their schools,' says Sharon Nasset, a real estate agent and community activist who graduated from Holy Cross School in 1973. 'Everybody could walk to the schools. They were in the neighborhood and of the neighborhood.'

Most of the closed schools no longer have their own alumni gatherings. Nasset says she is helping organize the reunion to make sure there are no more closures in the area.

'We have talked about the fact that if we don't care for the schools we have they might go away forever,' she says.

North Portland is unique in Oregon in that, within a radius of only a few miles, there is Catholic education from kindergarten through graduate school. The University of Portland is just a few miles from De La Salle North and just down the street from Holy Cross.

Nasset is counting on neighborhood pride to energize the reunion.

'You can take the boy out of North Portland, but you can't take North Portland out of the boy,' she says, flipping through papers in the desk in her realty office. 'I have people who grew up here, left and now are just flocking back.'

North Catholic High School was seen as innovative in its day. It was the first modern Catholic co-educational high school in Portland.

Founded in 1958, on the heels of Sputnik, it was coed and emphasized Catholic social action, math and science.

In 1961, a new $125,000 science building set a standard for Catholic school laboratories.

In the 1960s, it even offered such electives as African-American culture.

In 1911, the Dominican Sisters opened Immaculata Academy next to Immaculate Heart Parish and offered girls' commercial training and then rigorous academic courses. In the late 1950s, the school was moved to outer Northeast Portland and called Marycrest. The sisters left the institution in 1973.

The alumnae of Immaculata-Marycrest meet twice per year and offer scholarships for youths to attend Catholic schools. North Portland was home to the St. Rose Industrial School beginning in 1916. The Sisters of the Good Shepherd cared for girls in trouble and offered them an education. The sisters left the site in 1980. v