The possibilities are unique and endless at 345 East 4th Street. The property is currently configured as a former religious assembly space with 30' ceilings on the main floor, a mezzanine space, and an owner's apartment above. Delivered vacant and outside a historic district, with a total of 9,232 buildable SF, this property offers the opportunity to create a large community facility or a residential single-family home. The property presents a unique opportunity for a developer or an end user.
It was built in 1892 for the Church of St. Elizabeth of Hungary, which served the Slovak and Hungarian immigrant communities. In 1918, the building became a Russian Orthodox Church (the white-painted wrought iron entrance gate still has a crest with a double-headed eagle), and finally in 1975, a Western Orthodox Catholic Church that sought to practice Mozarabic liturgy, which was used by Christian communities living under Arab rule in early-Medieval Iberia (now Spain and Portugal). The Mozarabic Rite, also called the Hispanic Rite, is extremely uncommon outside of Spain.
The city declined to landmark the building a few years back.
There's hope that an arts organization might take it over... or the new owner could knock it down and build up using the 4,700 square feet in unused air rights.
Here, a compact dining room with a chef's counter and seating outdoors are the backdrop for Ms. Freeman's smoked grits with torched oyster mushrooms, a black-eyed pea and garlic pancake, maple buttermilk cornbread, stuffed collards with Aleppo rice, roasted purple yams with blackberry coulis and toasted marshmallows, and a seasonal fruit cobbler. Plant-based stand-ins are used in place of real dairy, as in the ice cream for the cobbler and the rosemary butter on the grits.
Carol spent her adult life in Lower East Side rentals. In the 1980s, she and Robert Joyce founded the E. 7th Street Block Association which had trees planted, increased street safety and garbage pick-ups, and brought neighbors together at street fairs. Carol fought against gentrification, sometimes winning long battles to keep the heights of new buildings scaled to the neighborhood and protecting old brownstones from being demolished for high rises.
I always viewed Carol with a bit of awe, as a wondrous, fantastical creature, a quintessential New York character. Bob Joyce said it this way, recalling his wife as "a New Yorker born and bred, with no tolerance for hypocrisy..."Her only shortcomings, he noted, were that "she did not drink wine or eat pasta." He called her "the love of my life."
You can read the full essay here. Bob Joyce is now living upstate with relatives.
Thank you to Dinky Romilly for the photos!
The COVID-19 pandemic has posed significant challenges that acutely threaten the survival of the 42-year-old organization. The Sixth Street Community Center is in a unique situation where the organization owns the building that houses their programs, and they are saddled with monthly mortgage payments that they have been unable to keep up with while trying to support basic expenses for staff and programs.Unfortunately, mortgage moratoriums are not effective in keeping their mortgage collectors at bay. Unlike other small community-based organizations that have shuttered their doors during the pandemic, Sixth Street Community Center has kept our doors wide open to address the unprecedented levels of food insecurity that our community is facing.We are very proud that we were able to pivot our work to organize and launch a free emergency food distribution, which has been operating to serve over 400 families weekly for nine months since April. Through supportive partnerships with emergent mutual aid groups and a steady team of volunteers, we've also been using our Center's kitchen to cook over 2,000 meals a week, which are provided at no cost to homeless and food-insecure individuals and families across the Lower East Side, East Village, East Harlem, and Queens. Since the onset of COVID, we have supported over 16,000 families through our food access work.
