Photos by EVG reader Kait
The gutting of the former Iglesia Bautista Emmanuel is underway at 256 E. Fourth St. between Avenue B and Avenue C.
Workers arrived last week for a church-to-condo conversion. According to DOB permits, the four-story structure will receive two additional floors to accommodate six residences, presumably condos, based on the square footage.
The plywood includes a rendering of the all-new residences ... StudioSC is listed as the architect of record.
The church had been on the market for several years and changed hands last fall for $2.95 million.
The new owner is listed as an LLC, per public records.
As for history, there's plenty of it here...
According to Daytonian in Manhattan, the property, dating to 1859, was once part of the estate of Petrus Stuyvesant. It later became known as the Lemberger Shul.
In 1925, the Lemberger Congregation purchased the buildings and hired architect James J. Millman to design a shul, or synagogue, on the site. The congregation took its name from its native city, Lemberg, at the time the center of the Lwów Voivodeship of Poland. The city is known today as Lviv, Ukraine.The new building was faced in red brick and trimmed in stone. Millman's understated design relied mostly on Gothic arches over the openings. Projecting brickwork between the second and third floors, and on either side of the central rondel above the entrance provided interest. There were two entrances, one above a short, centered stoop, and another to the right for the women worshipers. It is unclear whether the rondel was always bricked in, or if it originally contained a rose window.In either case, it almost certainly displayed a Magen David, or Star of David. Set within the parapet is a stone Decalogue, representing the tablets of Moses.
In the early 1970s, the synagogue became home to the Spanish-language Iglesia Bautista Emmanuel.
As Daytonian noted (and the post is definitely worth a read):
Iglesia Bautista Emmanuel remains in the converted synagogue — the Christian cross in the rondel happily coexisting with the Jewish Decalogue above it.
Based on the rendering, neither of those elements will co-exist at the address any more.
