We wrote about this landmark church in the Lower East Side back in 2008.  It's one of those manifestations of actual diversity within the human diaspora and the landscape of New York City that serve to foster a zeal for life itself.  We've learned recently that it has been put up for sale by the owner, the resident canon who is the nephew of the founder In the spirit of Jeremiah's Vanishing New York, these kinds of changes not only hollow out the landscape of the city but they scrape against our insides and leave abrasions on our soul.  San Isidoro y San Leandro Western Orthodox Catholic Church has served as a sanctuary and a home for the sacraments and the beautiful Mozarabic liturgy.  Sarah Bean Apmann sums it up succinctly in her article for the Greenwich Village Society for Historic Preservation, entitled Why Isn’t This Landmarked?: San Isidoro y San Leandro Western Orthodox Catholic Church of the Hispanic Mozarabic Rite

"Churches and synagogues such as these, located on single lot sites filling the space of what was once a single home, were once found throughout the East Village and Lower East Side. They were reflective of the incredibly modest resources but bold ambitions of the immigrant communities they served. Increasingly few such structures survive today. The East Village remains woefully under-landmarked and therefore valuable historic resources such as these churches and synagogues are vulnerable to insensitive alteration and demolition. The highly unusual church at 345 East 4th Street retains nearly all of its original Gothic Revival details while reflecting the imprint and religious traditions of various important immigrant and migrant communities which shaped the Lower East Side and New York – Central Europeans in the late nineteenth century, Eastern Europeans in the early twentieth century, and Puerto Ricans and Hispanics in the mid-to-late twentieth century."

The congregation was mostly Puerto Rican but included local residents from all sorts of backgrounds.  The real estate crowd in Manhattan needs to temper their zeal when they insist that "no regular congregation every attends the church".  To couch it this way is disingenuous.  To comment on the membership of any society or group after it has been announced that it is closing and the misery of the ending of something is allowed to draw the curtains, well these are not the sort of circumstances one leverages for taking a census.  The fact is that this church served as an epicenter of a community of people who were baptized, confirmed and married here.  Generations of congregations members had their first communion within the sacred walls of this small independent church.  

345 East 4th Street (photo credit:  https://www.villagepreservation.org/ )