Patrick Charles Keely (1816, Thurles, County Tipperary — Aug. 11, 1896, Brooklyn, New York) was an Irish-American architect based in Brooklyn, New York and Providence, Rhode Island. He was a prolific designer of churches for the Roman Catholic Church or Roman Catholic patrons in the eastern United States of America and Canada, particularly in New York City, Boston, Massachusetts, and Chicago in the later half of the nineteenth century. He is reputed to have designed nearly six hundred churches and hundreds of other institutional buildings (although the 600 number may be an exaggeration, the number of churches he did design number in the hundreds). He designed every nineteenth-century Catholic cathedral in New England.1 Several other church and institutional architects began their careers in his firm.
Keely's son in law was Thomas Houghton, an architect of note in Brooklyn.
Keely's first church commission was the original Ss. Peter & Paul church in Williamsburgh, commissioned by Father Sylvester Malone in 1848. He had a particularly close relationship with the Diocese of Brooklyn over the course of his career, but designed relatively few churches for the Diocese of New York (after his second commission, St. Bridget's Church in the East Village, also completed in 1848, he designed only a handful of churches in New York and the Bronx).
There are many churches that are attributed to Keely that were not designed by him. These include:
- St. Patrick R.C. Church, Brooklyn (probably designed by James J. Lyons)
- Our Lady of Grace, Hoboken (probably designed by Francis Himpler)
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