An Irish Famine Church Decays In East Village

"The first thing our ancestors did when they emigrated here was build a church," said Patti Kelly, a stained-glass artist and an organizer of a benefit on Sunday to raise money to save St. Brigid's, a Roman Catholic church on 8th Street and Avenue B, across from Tompkins Square Park. Known as the Irish Famine church, St. Brigid's was built in the late 1840s by poor Irish immigrants who had settled on the teeming Lower East Side to be close to the docks where many worked in backbreaking labor.

Today their Carpenter Gothic church is under an order of demolition from the Archdiocese of New York, which says it is structurally unsound. Angry parishioners and neighbors contend that the more important consideration for the archdiocese is that the church's neighborhood, today called the East Village, is one of the hottest in New York. A longtime parishioner, Edwin Torres, said, "For the hierarchy the church is now a business, and the cardinal is the CEO." An East Village resident, Roland Legiardi-Laura, who has lived across the street from St. Brigid's for 28 years, called the building "my friend and neighbor and source of psychic salvation on the block for the last 126 years."

The church and its school, which take up an entire block front, constitute what real estate experts say may be the largest remaining developable site facing a major park in Manhattan.

All over New York churches and synagogues that were built by immigrants and are seen today by neighbors as permanent fixtures are facing threats to survival that accompany thinning congregations, declining finances, deteriorating structures - and a strong real estate market that can make some financial problems disappear. The Catholics alone built hundreds of churches - no one is sure how many, but scholars estimate the number to be more than 1,000, many of which successfully adapted to and embraced the full cycle of immigrants. The mid-19th-century Irish were followed by Germans and Italians, then Slavs, and finally Latinos after World War II. St. Brigid's, which has hosted every group, had become primarily a Latino parish when shuttered by the archdiocese in 2004. Some in the East Village are bitter about the closing. "Why would you do this to believers?" B.G. Firmani asked. "Are there so many believers in the East Village that you would dis them and feel confident that you were doing the right thing?"

There is no question that attendance at Catholic churches is in a downward spiral. A historian and co-director of the Curran Center for American Catholic Studies at Fordham University, James Fisher, said the archdiocese does have a genuine substantive problem. "On the one hand there's more religious vitality than ever in New York, an incredible multicultural, unprecedented variety of congregational life, every conceivable tradition globally has come here. There's been a tremendous expansion locally of evangelical Christianity. But what's really struggling are the old mainstream denominations, old-line Protestants, some synagogues, and definitely Euro-American Catholic ethnic parishes." He noted that one solution is the merging of parishes, such as that of St. Bernard's on West 14th Street, founded by Irish longshoremen, with Our Lady of Guadalupe, a large, vital Latino parish that lacked sufficient worship space.

But St. Brigid's parishioners do not want to merge. They fought hard to save the church, raising $103,000 mostly from working-class families who contributed the money on top of their weekly offerings. Mr. Torres argues that the church's current deteriorated condition is partly the responsibility of the archdiocese itself, which demolished the old school in the late 1950s. "The school held up the east wall of the church," Mr. Torres said. "The wall is almost 60 feet tall and is not concave. They knocked down the school, filled in the hole with rubble, and the massive size and weight of the wall started moving east. The archdiocese hired a contractor, who is now out of business, to shore it up.

"Now they say it would take $600,000 to correct the situation. Everything the archdiocese does is grossly exaggerated. We got a bid of $285,000 from one of the best contractors in New York. But they just ignore us."

A spokesman for the archdiocese, Joseph Zwilling, said the church building must be demolished, but that it has not yet set a date. Nor has it determined the future use of the property. The school, he said, "will stay in place for the time being." The archdiocese is in the midst of what it calls a "realignment effort" to close underused churches among its 413 parishes, reduce the number of Masses, redeploy priests, and consolidate parishioners. "Our first priority," Mr. Zwilling said, "will be to seek other Catholic uses that could be made for a particular site. A Catholic nursing home is one possibility. Our primary consideration throughout the entire realignment is to continue our ministry even when we close a parish."

Nonetheless, the archdiocese is embroiled in fights with parishioners all over New York, particularly in prime neighborhoods like the Village and Harlem. The National Catholic Reporter ran a story last week saying that an Italian-owned Manhattan-based real estate development company with ties to high-ranking Vatican officials had entered into contracts to acquire more than $100 million of church property in three cities in America, including New York. Such reports send shivers of fear through neighborhoods, but particularly among preservationists.

The president of the Landmarks Conservancy, Peg Breen, herself the great-granddaughter of Irish Famine immigrants, pointed out that when churches are closed, the archdiocese has often been looking for fair market value for the property. Ms. Breen does not object, but says that in several cases, including St. Brigid's, "the community has identified angel funders willing to come in with real money to acquire the property and restore the church." Mr. Zwilling said there have been offers, but he refuses to discuss them in any detail.

Meanwhile, another Catholic parish on the Lower East Side, St. Theresa's at 10 Rutgers St., saved its 1842 Gothic church by selling a parking lot and air rights over the church to a developer for $2.5 million in late 1998. Builder Alan Bell, a principal with the Hudson Companies, called the project a win-win. "The key thing is that we were able to use all the zoning there was to build an 83-unit apartment building, which is fully occupied at market rents." Rents range from $1,900 a month for a studio to $4,000 for a two-bedroom. "Even though we're 100% market rents," he added, "we qualified as a depressed neighborhood under the Community Reinvestment Act so that our lender gave us a lower rate."

St. Theresa's has a happy ending. On a recent Sunday, parishioners who seemed to represent most of New York's ethnic groups streamed in and out of the church. Mr. Bell said, "They restored their church, and now they're restoring their congregation."

Hoping for a similarly happy outcome, parishioners and neighbors of St. Brigid's have sued the archdiocese to forestall demolition. And it turns out the archdiocese doesn't own the church, which was incorporated under the state's religious corporation law. A lawyer who brought the suit on behalf of the Committee to Save St. Brigid's, Harry Kresky, said, "Everyone agrees that the question of whether or not to maintain a church is a religious decision within the power of the cardinal. But the cardinal doesn't own this church, and the archdiocese has no authority to demolish it." The case is now before the Appellate Division of the New York State Supreme Court.