Public School 64, 1920. Constructed between 1904 and 1906 to the designs of BOE architect C.B.J. Snyder, the French Renaissance Revival style building adheres to Snyder's usual H shaped design. When opened the school could hold 2,500 students and later had an annex constructed to accommodate a larger student body. As the populations of the East Village and Lower East Side declined in the 1970s and in the midst of the city's financial crisis, the school was closed in 1977. Soon after closing the building became the home of a number of non-profits, including Adopt-A-Building (which trained and empowered residents of blighted neighborhoods to improve their own buildings) and CHARAS (a neighborhood center that fostered community-based urban ecology, arts and culture). After two decades of successful reactivation of the school space, the building was sold by the Giuliani administration to a developer in 1998. The groups were evicted in 2001. For the last 15 years, the building has continued to deteriorate. The school was landmarked in 2006 and various plans have been suggested for its redevelopment, including as dormitories, which most of the local community vehemently opposes. In the fall of 2017 current mayor De Blasio stated that the city wished to buy back the property, but the future of the building is unknown.

East Side Hebrew Institute (left) and Church of St. Brigid (right), ca. 1975. Founded in 1910, the Institute was a Talmud Torah school (providing after-school and weekend classes) until mid-century when it added a day school. However, the blight and crime of the 1970s made the school’s Tompkins Square location untenable; the school moved to Irving Place in 1975, leaving the building abandoned.

545 East 11th Street ca. 1930 One of the East Village’s few individually designated New York City landmarks is a distinctive Gothic Revival church at 545 East 11th Street. The building, today known as Father’s Heart Church, has been a distinctive presence in the East Village for more than 140 years. Its name and the nature of its congregants have changed over time, but its mission of spirituality and service has been consistent through the years. The Father’s Heart Church was constructed between 1867 and 1868 as the Methodist Episcopal Chapel by the New York City Sunday School and Missionary Society of the Methodist Episcopal Church, an organization that provided religious services as well as housing, food and clothing. Its construction was funded by the sale of the Dry Dock Mission at East 9th Street & Avenue B, with donations and pledges totaling $25,000. The Methodist Episcopal Chapel was an early project of the architectural firm of William Field and Son who would go on to design a number of notable buildings including the Hastings Building (1870) at 134-40 Grand Street in the SoHo-Cast Iron Historic District Expansion and worker housing financed by housing reformer and philanthropist Alfred Treadway White. The Home (1876) and Tower (1888) Buildings and the Workingmen’s Cottages (1879) in Cobble Hill, Brooklyn had indoor toilets and running water in the apartments, open stairways for better ventilation and playgrounds as well as libraries – all marked improvements from the living conditions in tenement buildings. Throughout its history the church has served the spiritual and social needs of its congregants and the community. In 1868, the Chapel established the Cornell Reading Room (Sound familiar? No, not that Cornell but close…) which offered “intellectual instruction and amusement for persons of both sexes, above fourteen years of age, who live in that overcrowded and poverty-stricken locality. Supplied with books, magazines, newspapers, stereoscopes, soetropes, and other parlor amusements,” according to the New York Times, March 27, 1869. The Reading Room was funded by William Wiggins Cornell, President of the City Sunday School and Missionary Society of the Methodist Episcopal Church of New York. Cornell, with his brother John Black Cornell, operated one of the largest cast iron construction firms in the city, J. B. & W. W. Cornell & Co. You’ve probably walked by one of their many foundry marks on buildings they worked on throughout the city. Cornell is also the namesake of the Cornell College (1855) in Mount Vernon, Iowa, not Cornell University (1865), in Ithaca, New York which was founded by his distant cousin Ezra Cornell, of Western Union. In addition to the Reading Room the Church sent local children to the country and had a medical dispensary. Dispensaries were the 19th century equivalent of today’s health clinic that offers free and low cost medical care. The Stuyvesant Polyclinic at 137 Second Avenue was another medical dispensary in the area. As it expanded its services, the Church grew and evolved. In 1874 a small rear addition was added to house a school. Twenty five years later the Church bought the neighboring tenement building at 543 East 11th Street and renovated both buildings. The architectural firm of Louis E. Jallade & Joel D. Barber completed the work which included converting the tenement for classroom use and changing the façade of the church by remodeling the door in the Colonial Revival style, adding brick quoins and a stone lintel as well as moving the door from the center to the western bay where it remains today. Following the completion of the renovations, in 1901 the church was renamed the People’s Home Church and Settlement. In addition to a sanctuary, the buildings housed a kindergarten, nursery, gymnasium, public baths and classrooms. The Church primarily served a German population but also had a large Italian Mission and services were offered in both languages. The Methodist Episcopal Church closed the church in 1930 and it became a Russian church in 1931. In 1941 the Church and the tenement were sold to the Russian Ukrainian & Polish Pentecostal Church, the first Slavic Pentecostal Church in the United States. The Russian Ukrainian & Polish Pentecostal Church was established in 1919 by Ivan Efimovicha Voronaeff a Russian-born minster who converted from the Baptist faith to Pentecostalism. Before acquiring the buildings at 543-545 East 11th Street, the Church used the facilities of the Emmanuel Presbyterian Church at 737 6th Street, between Avenues C & D. The Emmanuel Presbyterian Church remains at the same location, but its stunning High Victorian Gothic building (1874) was demolished and replaced by a Brutalist style building in 1970. By 1983, the Ukrainian and Polish speaking congregants had formed separate churches and the building was renamed the Evangelical Christian Church. In 1998, the Evangelical Church merged with The Father’s ...

St. Brigid's Roman Catholic Church, viewed from Tompkins Square Park, ca. 1977. During the 1840s, a significant population of Irish immigrants settled in the Dry Dock District, in the present-day Alphabet City section of Manhattan's East Village. St. Brigid's was founded to serve this heavily Catholic community, with the cornerstone of the Patrick Keely-designed church laid in 1848. During the late 1980s, St. Brigid's became aligned with protestors and the neighborhood's homeless and disadvantaged residents, especially during the Tompkins Square park riots and relate police actions. By this time, the church's structure — built on piles in infilled marshland — had been deteriorating for some time (the church's twin steeples were dismantled in 1962, due to safety concerns). In 2001, longstanding structural concerns came to a head when the archdiocese ordered the church closed after engineers found it to be in imminent danger of collapse. In 2004, the parish was officially disbanded. In July 2006, demolition began abruptly, after unsuccessful efforts buy the Committee to Save St. Brigid's to forestall the wrecking ball. After immediate public outcry, the Manhattan Supreme Court temporarily stayed demolition, before permanently halting proceedings in August. Two years later, an anonymous gift of $20 million changed parish fortunes, funding a five year restoration project. Today, the renovated church is home to combined parishes of St. Brigid's and St. Emeric.

331 East 10th Street Building Date : 1904 Original Use : Institutional Original Owner : New York Public Library Original Architect : McKim, Mead & White Description & Building Alterations The Tompkins Square Branch of the New York Public Library is one of the earliest branches commissioned by Andrew Carnegie. It was designed by the nationally known firm, McKim, Mead & White, who was responsible for many classically influenced buildings in New York City and twelve other Carnegie branch libraries. Andrew Carnegie funded 67 local libraries in New York City, most of which were designed by the city’s top architecture firms. McKim, Mead and White designed thirteen libraries. This building was designated a New York City Landmark in May of 1998. Constructed in 1904 in the Classical Revival Style, the building’s three story, three-bay wide limestone and granite facade features rusticated piers from the ground level to the cornice, which consists of dentils and an ornamented frieze. Each story is separated by a belt course. On the second level, the windows are topped with decorated tympanums and surrounded with rounded arches that are repeated on the ground level. At the center of the tympanums is the seal of the City of New York , flanked by colophones of the Aldine Press of Venice and the Christophe Plantin Press of Antwerp.

New York City has the largest network of community gardens in the United States. Community gardens borrow from earlier urban-gardening movements, such as Frannie Griscolm Parsons' educational "Farm-Gardens" of the early 20th-century and Depression-era "subsistence gardens" which provided for communities across the city. Beginning in the 1960s, New Yorkers increasingly favored progressive government programs and looked towards the city to sponsor many past-due revitalization efforts for neighborhoods. One such effort was community gardens, which beautified abandoned lots and, most importantly, allowed the community to have an active say in the design of their urban environment.

540 East 13th Street | Block : 406 | Lot #24 Building Date : 1923 Original Use : Commercial Original Owner : Louis Levey Original Architect : Morris Whinston Description & Building Alterations The current building was constructed in 1923 by architect Morris Whinston as a one-story laundry, according to the Office for Metropolitan History. A 1915 photograph reveals that an earlier laundry building existed here previously.

746 East 9th Street. Service Builders Supply is visible.

93 Avenue D; 283 East 7th Street Building Date : 1903 Original Use : Residential/Commercial Original Owner : Samuel Greenstein Original Architect : Alfred E. Badh Description & Building Alterations This six story New Law tenement building was designed by Alfred E. Badh and was erected in 1902 to house 20 families for $45,000. The building is light brick with red brick detailing brick belt courses along the second story and windows feature pediment and broken pediment lintels, arches, and decorative keystones. Stores were located on the ground floor, which is still true today. The building was originally owned by Samuel Greenstein of 123 Orchard Street. Two earlier buildings were demolished to make way for this building.

East Side Hebrew Institute ca. 1975 Now home to seven apartments, 295 East 8th Street a.k.a. 127 Avenue B, opened in 1887 as the Children’s Aid Society, Tompkins Square Lodging for Boys and Industrial School. Landmarked in 2000, 295 East 8th Street was “one of a series of buildings in which the Children’s Aid Society sheltered and educated destitute working children, particularly newsboys and bootblacks.” according to the designation report. Designed by Calvert Vaux of the architectural firm of Vaux and Redford, in the style of High Victorian Gothic, the building is the oldest remaining property built for the use of the Children’s Aid Society. It may be the oldest remaining boarding house designed by Vaux. The land acquisition and building construction was funded by a $50,000 donation by Mrs. Robert L. Stuart, (about $1 million today according to the Daytonion). From 1887 to 1910 the building served its original purpose which was not just to house, feed, and clothe the boys, but to reform them into successful members of society. In 1910 the building ceased operations as a boarding house and was a Children’s Aid Society school until 1925. In 1925 the building was purchased by the Darchei Noam Congregation, which used the space as a Jewish social service building and Yeshiva for almost the next 50 years. The building was left vacant in 1974 until it was purchased in 1977 and developed into apartments in 1978. It was renovated again in 2003. Matt Dillon allegedly lived at 295 East 8th Street in the mid 2000’s

Christodora House ca. 1929 Christodora House was constructed in 1928 as a settlement house for low- income and immigrant residents, providing food, shelter, and educational and health services. It was founded by Christina Isobel MaColl and Sarah Carson to care for “the physical, social, intellectual, and spiritual development of the people in the crowded portions of the city of New York, and the training of those who shall be in residence in practical methods of settlement work.” Christodora House also launched the career of social reformer Harry Lloyd Hopkins, advisor to Franklin D. Roosevelt and architect of the New Deal programs. Christodora’s bold experiment in providing both housing and services in the same building was an important but challenging one. The combination presaged the mix typically found in public housing, which began in New York around the same time just blocks away at First Houses. However, in part because of the massive expansion of publicly funded public housing nearby providing similar services and housing, Christodora’s model became more and more financially burdensome, and the building was sold via condemnation to the City in 1948. The building remained abandoned or semi-utilized until 1975, when the City sold it to a private owner. After changing hands many times in the ensuing years, in 1986 work began to convert the building to high-end residences, and it became a symbol of gentrification in the neighborhood, as well as a flashpoint for resistance to it. That said, the building has housed a number of notable artists and activists in the years since its conversion, including Iggy Pop. Today the East Village Community Coalition also calls the building home.

The Eagle Pencil Company was one of the largest producers of No. 2 pencils in the early 20th century, employing thousands in New York City. In mid-1938 the company announced a 10% pay cut for all existing employees with an increased working schedule to 44 hours a week. On June 16th, 1938, 850 Eagle Pencil Workers walked out to demand a contract and restoration of the recent pay cut. The strike was recorded extensively by the Edwin Levick Studio, the leaders in the emerging spot news photography. The studio sold these photos to local newspapers around the city. The strike became well known and was even covered in the local Marxist paper, 'The Socialist Appeal,' arguing for public support for the union workers. The strike lasted seven weeks, ending on August 8th when the company agreed to welcome back all the striking employees and promised to reinstate their original pay.

“View of 18-story Christadora House from Tompkins Square, showing a game of ball being played in the park. February 29, 1929.” Designed by Henry C. Pelton, the building originally included both a settlement house, with various social services and community facilities (including an indoor swimming pool), and residential apartments to support the settlement’s activities via rental income. In 1948, no longer able to finance settlement operations, the Christadora Board of Managers sold the building to the city. It fell into disuse — or extra-legal use — for decades before being redeveloped as condominiums in the 1980s, becoming a target of the 1988 Tompkins Square Park Riot for its role in the neighborhood’s nascent gentrification.

636 East 6th Street | Block : 387 | Lot #127 Building Date : 1846 Original Use : Residential Original Owner : John Pheilan Original Architect : Unknown Description & Building Alterations No. 636 East 6th Street was erected in 1846 as a row house. It was altered for the United Brethren Mission of the Moravian Church in 1889 by architects Calvert Vaux and George K. Radford. In 1906, the building became a synagogue. On the 1853 map it is a brick dwelling. On the 1868 map, the house has been extended at the rear and it is labeled “Moravian Chapel,” and by 1893 it is labeled “P.E. Church.” The first architect associated with the building, in 1889, is George Kent Radford, who worked with Calvert Vaux on the building adjacent in the same year. Originally a Moravian Chapel, the building also served as a German Church and a synagogue at one time. A rose window was once above the door where there is now a cross in a recessed circle. There was also a cornice at the top of the building, similar in design to its neighbor at 638 East 6th Street. Based on alteration permits from 1909, it appears that the front of the building underwent significant changes. The bricks at the top of the facade are set at forty five degree angles, creating an interesting pattern and texture. Terra cotta tiles cover the window openings. The openings are capped by decorative brick work and are arched at the tops; the center opening features a pointed arch.

539 East 12th Street Building Date : 1845 Original Use : Residential Original Owner : Joseph Stuyvesant Original Architect : Unknown Description & Building Alterations According to tax records, this modest three story brick row house was built in 1845. The bracketed cornice and parapet are unusual for this style, and both were likely added at a later date. The storefront has been altered over the years, but the entrance on the right seems to have retained a bracketed pediment.

Join us for a tour filled with Village Pride!

This image was gifted to the National Art Gallery by Gary S. David.

Public School 36, 1920. Constructed in 1876 as Grammar School No. 36 and designed by David I. Stagg (whose career as a builder of schools lasted half a century), the school building on East 9th Street replaced a previous Board of Education school on the site (Ward School 21). The four-story structure with a five-story central entrance bay, Grammar School 36, later P.S. 36, remained in service to the neighborhood children until the 1970s. For three decades at the end of the 20th century it was the home of the Henry Street Settlement Day Care and Loisaida, a Latino neighborhood revitalization organization. In 2011 the former school underwent a massive interior and exterior renovation. The building had a a full fifth floor added on either side of the historic top floor bay. Today it functions as a residence for homeless young adults and youth that have aged out of the foster system, as well as a community center for the Loisaida organization.

Construction on the BMT Canarsie Line (L) at Avenue D, November 28, 1916.

601-630 East 9th Street; 143 Avenue B Building Date : 1928 Original Use : Settlement House Original Owner : Christodora House Original Architect : Henry C. Pelton Description & Building Alterations On the northeast corner of Avenue B and East 9th Street is the Christodora House, founded as the Young Women’s Settlement by Christina MacColl and Sarah Libby Carson. Built in 1928 and designed by Henry C. Pelton, the building originally served as a settlement house, a charity organization that provided housing, food, training, and health care to low-income immigrants. Its construction was funded by Mr. Arthur Curtiss James, a wealthy railroad and mining tycoon, and his wife, who served as president of Christodora’s board. The building included community spaces, a music school, an auditorium, a gymnasium, a chapel, a lounge, classrooms, and a library. On the upper floors, the building contained residential suites, a dining room, a lounge, a roof garden, and a solarium. It was the first settlement house to provide social services while making a profit, and was located on the at this site to expand the impact of settlement houses north of Houston Street. Several accounts report that George Gershwin gave his first public appearance here. The Christodora House is listed on the State and National Register of Historic Places. The building is clad in red brick, and its brick-faced steel piers are subtly raised. The two-story entryway on Avenue B showcases terra-cotta medallions and grotesques that outline the limestone enframement with fluted pilasters. At the top of the building, bands of Romanesque-inspired ornament outline the parapets. Like many of its neighbors, the building fell into disrepair in the post-World War II years and in 1969, due to extensive damage to the electrical system, the building was condemned. It sat vacant until 1975 when it was purchased at auction. In 1986, two developers converted the building into luxury condos, sparking anti-gentrification riots by residents. On August 6, 1988 for instance, upset neighbors organized a protest rally. Responding to unprovoked attacks by the police, protesters used a police barricade to smash the windows and front door of the Christodora House, vandalizing the building’s lobby.

No. 206 East 7th Street, an Old Law Tenement, was constructed in 1900 and designed by architect Michael Bernstein, one year after its architecturally similar neighbor at 204 East 7th Street, by the same architect. Allen Ginsberg lived in the building from 1952 to 1953 after his institutionalization at Columbia Presbyterian Psychiatric Institute. Ginsberg befriended a fellow patient named Carl Solomon, nephew of A. A. Wyn of Ace Books. Solomon helped publish Junkie: Confessions of an Unredeemed Drug Addict, written by beat generation writer William S. Burroughs as a confessional novel. Ginsberg and Burroughs lived together on the third floor of this building, after Burroughs accidentally shot and killed his wife in Mexico and sought refuge. The six-story building is four bays wide and clad in buff brick. The windows at the first and fifth floors are arched with decorative keystones and the windows at the second floor have segmental arches also with decorative keystones. The windows at the third and fourth floors are capped by ornate lintels and the entire facade features recessed bands of contrasting red brick. The first floor is three bays with the entry at the center and all of the openings are arched. The metal cornice is intact and It originally housed twenty-four families with stores on the ground floor. The architectural features of the building’s upper stories remain intact, however, the above-ground basement appears to have undergone some changes since its construction. This image is from Village Preservation's East Village Building Blocks map. You can explore the map and more buildings in the East Village by clicking here.

Carpathian Russian Orthodox Catholic Church of the Holy Trinity, April 26, 1935. Constructed in 1892, this church first served the Slovak and Hungarian immigrant community. From 1918 1o 1975 it was a Russian Eastern Orthodox Church, and from 1975 until recently was the home of a little-known Catholic sect that practices the Mozarabic rite (possibly the only congregation of its kind in the United States).

127 Avenue B ca. 1928 This building was erected in 1886 by the Children’s Aid Society as the Tompkins Square Lodging for Boys and Industrial School. It was designed by Calvert Vaux and George K. Radford as a combination home and school for poor boys, particularly newsboys and bootblacks. The Children’s Aid Society engaged Vaux and Radford to design about a dozen residences for needy children between 1879 and 1892; this is the third, in rust-colored brick with matching terra-cotta ornamentation, a varied roofline with dormers and chimneys, and a prominent corner tower — complementing the tower of St. Brigid’s Church across 8th Street. An article in Harper's from 1886 about the building describes its denizens: “the grimy little bootblacks and their rivals in trade, the newsboys.” The boys “can sleep in a common dormitory for a nickel a night. …The boy willing to cough up a dime can sleep like a little prince in his own bed.” The status of child laborers in America was a subject to which Harper’s would return in other articles. The Lodging for Boys, commonly called “the Newsboys Home,” had several lives before becoming a seven-unit apartment building. According to Roland Legiardi-Laura, one of the resident-owners of the building (which also has renters), in the 20th century a Jewish center called Talmud Torah Darchei Noam owned the building, then the East Side Hebrew Institute. In the late 1970s, Legiardi-Laura and others acquired the building and financed a series of renovations, from removing the light yellow and dark red paint that covered the building, to replacing the slate and copper roofing, to renovating the entryway in mahogany, to re-pointing the brick façade. Still ahead, they would like to restore to their original style all 65 window and door penetrations on the two facades; the perimeter metal fencing; and a side entry on the 8th Street alleyway. The owners welcomed designation as a New York City Landmark in 2000, and won a New York Landmarks Conservancy Lucy G. Moses Preservation Award in 2008. And the building continues to inspire pride and joy in its neighbors.

532-542 East 12th Street Building Date : N/A Original Use : Playground Original Owner : N/A Original Architect : N/A Description & Building Alterations This large lot is the site of a playground known as Joseph C. Sauer Park. It was once home to a seven-story tenement as well as a school building that can be seen on an 1867 map. The school, designed in a classical style, at one time was called P.S. 126 and is visible in a historic photo from 1931.

"Tompkins Square Branch of the New York Public Library, ca. 1904." The history of the Tompkins Square Branch goes back to 1901, when controversial steel magnate Andrew Carnegie donated $5.2 million to the city to help build a network of branch libraries across the five boroughs. The Tompkins Square Branch was the ninth Carnegie Library built in the city and was designed in a restrained Classical Revival style by Charles McKim of the well-known firm of McKim, Mead, & White. Carnegie’s business dealings were known as very anti-labor and for the violent repression of striking workers during the Homestead strike. The library’s designation report notes that the nearby institutional buildings helped influence the siting of the library – these include P.S. 64 to the east, which was in the planning stages, the (now landmarked) public baths a block north on 11th Street, and the Boys Club Building on Avenue A and 10th Street. The library reached out to the local community from its beginning — at the time the large German population was giving way to new immigrant groups like Italians, Eastern-European Jews, and Poles. The library held one of the most extensive Polish book collections in the city, and used its specially-built community rooms for meetings and classes for the public. The New York Public Library Digital Gallery houses a great collection of English language course posters from 1920 that show the diverse communities that the library sought to serve, and continues today. Today the Tompkins Square Branch continues the tradition of community education and offers programs like picture book readings for toddlers, yoga classes, art and manga drawing workshops.

638 East 6th Street Building Date : 1846 Original Use : Residential Original Owner : William Shay Original Architect : Unknown Description & Building Alterations This three story, three bay, masonry structure has a symmetrical facade clad in gray brick with red brick at the top floor set at a 45 degree angle creating an interesting pattern. The parapet is peaked at the center and has a bracketed cornice. The windows are double hung with small square panes around a large center pane. There is a large rose window at the third floor flanked by horseshoe arch windows and decorative egg and dart molding around each. At the center of the second floor is a double hung window capped by a Gothic arched window and also surrounded by egg and dart molding. The round arched entry surround has a replacement door but still maintains the egg and dart molding at the top. The 1853 map illustrates a brick dwelling at this location. By 1868 the structure is a two story store or warehouse and by 1893 it is a brick building with an iron front. The first record of this building comes from an alteration permit in 1869, indicating that the building was being used as an office. A decade later, the building was converted into a synagogue for the Congregation Ahawath Yeshurun Shara Torah. In 1900 in addition to other renovations, ritual baths were built in the basement. The building was used as a synagogue until the 1970’s when the 6th Street Block Association which would become the 6th Street Community Center began to use the building. Some architectural features pointing to its past have been retained, including a Hebrew Inscription over the entry door.

St. Brigid's Roman Catholic Church In the East Village, the Church of Saint Brigid-Saint Emeric was founded by Irish New Yorkers for an expanding Irish population. Originally known as St. Brigid’s, the church was built by notable Irish-American architect Patrick Keely, who designed and built almost 600 Catholic churches in the Eastern United States and Canada. Built on the corner of Avenue B and 8th Street, the cornerstone was laid in 1848 and was known as the “Irish Famine Church” as . As along the Hudson River in the West Village, commerce along the East River attracted many Irish immigrants. Along the East River, shipbuilding was the primary industry and the Church of St. Brigid’s was so named because Brigid was the patron saint of boatmen. Most recently, the church, in need of serious repair, was restored after a lengthy battle between the parishioners and the Diocese and an anonymous donation of 20 million dollars.

This remarkably intact Gothic Revival church’s form, design, details, and history reflect the kaleidoscope of immigrants and ethnic groups which called the Lower East Side home and shaped New York over the last century and a quarter — making it not just architecturally significant but an embodiment of New York City’s and the East Village’s immigrant history. This structure was originally built in 1891-92 and designed by Edward Wenz for the Church of St. Elizabeth of Hungary, serving the surrounding Slovak and Hungarian immigrant community. The church was the first national Slovak parish for the Slovak and Hungarian Catholics of New York and Brooklyn. Later the building was bought by the Russian Greek Orthodox National Association and became the Carpathian Russian Orthodox Church of St. Nicholas. It served the emerging Russian immigrant community in the early and mid-twentieth century, as evidenced by the royal seal of the Russian Czars located on the church’s front gates. After 1975, the church housed San Isidoro y San Leandro Western Orthodox Catholic Church of Hispanic Mozarabic Rite, a highly unusual Western Orthodox Catholic Church – seemingly one of the very few in America, and one of the few or perhaps only to practice the Mozarabic Rite. Two-headed eagle, symbolic of the Russian Empire, at the iron fence in front of the church Edward Wenz was a successful architect well known for his design of many speculative builders’ work, particularly residential structures in upper Manhattan. Born in Germany in 1855, he migrated to the United States and settled in New York City in 1880. It is not clear where Edward Wenz received his architectural education, but it is recorded that he started to practice architectural design as early as 1887. One of his most notable works, the Park View Flats on Central Park West between 103rd and 104th Streets (1893, demolished) was a combination of nine handsome apartment houses that occupied the entire block front facing Central Park. The Real Estate Record and Builders’ Guide of 1893 described it as among the year’s most notable structures along Central Park West. The early years of the Church of St. Elizabeth of Hungary were marked by instability and a constantly changing series of pastors and priests. From 1892 to 1895, in merely three years, three different pastors were appointed to replace the previous one. Conflicts between the Slovaks, who originally founded the church, and an increasing number of Hungarians that later became the majority of the congregation, intensified in 1895, resulting in the withdrawal of the Slovaks. In spite of this instability in its early decades, St. Elizabeth’s eventually became a leading Hungarian church in the city. In 1905, under the direction of the church pastor Francis C. Denes, who replaced the previous Slovak priest, a Hungarian Catholic Club was established, for which the Hungarian Consul-General served as the chairman. Denes’ apartment, which was on the top floor of the church building, hosted the first meeting of the club. As Central Europeans began to move uptown to neighborhoods like Yorkville, the Church of St. Elizabeth also relocated to East 83rd Street. As more Eastern Europeans moved into the neighborhood in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the church was sold to the Russian Greek Orthodox National Association, Inc. in 1918 for $18,500. Eastern Orthodoxy is a form of Christianity that diverged from Roman Catholicism in late antiquity and centered in Eastern Europe and in the Eastern Mediterranean. Separate national churches would evolve and these Eastern Orthodox churches would have a major presence in America with the immigration of the Eastern Europeans in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The see of the Russian Orthodox Church in America was moved from Alaska to San Francisco by 1880, but with the wave of immigration to New York from Eastern Europe at the end of the nineteenth century, the see was moved to New York City in 1905. The Russian Orthodox Greek Catholic Church sold the property in 1975 and it became the home to San Isidoro y San Leandro Western Orthodox Catholic Church of the Hispanic Mozarabic Rite. Western Rite Orthodoxy, Western Orthodoxy, and Orthodox Western Rite are terms used to describe congregations and groups which are in communion with Eastern Orthodox Churches or Oriental Orthodox Churches, but which use traditional Western liturgies rather than adopting Eastern liturgies such as the Divine Liturgy of St. John Chrysostom.

Even pencil making can be a contentious business- On June 16th, 1938, the Eagle Pencil Workers went on strike!