Miracle on Grand Street: Church of St. Mary to be Landmarked?

It doesn’t happen often but this time it might, as a historic Catholic edifice, the Church of St. Mary’s, erected on Grand Street in 1833, has moved a step closer towards being landmarked. The latest step in the parish’s 200 year saga came on Tuesday March 11, when the Landmarks Preservation Commission (LPC) heard testimony from community members speaking on behalf of St. Mary’s importance, both historically, and today.

Founded in 1826 in a former Presbyterian Church on Sheriff Street for the increasing number of Irish Catholic immigrants, St. Mary’s was built in a Greek revival style in 1832-1833. This original fieldstone can still seen on the church’s sides while the brick Romanesque façade with its two handsome spires was added in 1864.

By the late 1890s, this area was part of the immense, largely Eastern European Jewish “ghetto” known as Lower East Side. (When St. Mary’s was built, the was no “Upper” East Side.) Indeed, in the decades before and after the Williamsburg Bridge opened just two blocks north of St. May’s in 1903, nearby synagogues and kosher poultry markets likely numbered in the dozens.

Times change, immensely, and even as Jews, like the Irish, and the Germans before them, moved uptown, to Brooklyn and later to the suburbs. If it’s difficult to convey how densely populated this neighborhood once was—and remember, both Catholic and Jewish families were generally much larger then—a perusal of 1940 New York City tax photo shows how closely St. Mary’s was integrated within the neighborhood.

Though urban renewal makes St. Mary’s seem an anachronism apart from its neighbors, which include Seward Park Cooperative across the street and the Grand Street Guild—a subsidiary of Catholic Charities— buildings on either side of the parish, it’s isolation is deceptive. Puerto Ricans and later Dominicans, other Hispanics and others have sustained it as an active parish.

Reflecting these changes, as they do at numerous other Manhattan parishes, is the mass schedule. Sundays, for example, begin with Mass in English at 8:30 a.m., then are followed by Misa en español at 10 a.m., then a bilingual Mass at noon. After attending a recent bilingual Saturday mass, this reporter was asked by an amiable, older Hispanic man in a U.S. Army hat if he wanted to join the other parishioners in a basement retreat.

In Defense of Distinct Parishes

Among the speakers at the LPC meeting was District 1 Council Member Christopher Marte. It’s notable that St. Mary’s isn’t just a preservation issue for Marte.

Back in June 2023, for example, after the Archdiocese of New York announced that the parish would be administratively merged with Our Lady of Sorrows at 213 Stanton St., Marte wrote to to city’s then top clergy member, Cardinal Timothy Dolan, about the adverse effect the merger might have on St. Mary’s community programming and its pastor, Father Andrew O’Connor.

”Programs have and continue to cover everything from the arts and music to writing to services dedicated to our senior and youth populations,” wrote the council member, who is himself a graduate of St. Agnes Boys High School on the Upper West Side, which closed in 2013.

“The area around St. Mary’s has seen a booming residential population with the completion of Essex Crossing and two new buildings on Norfolk and Suffolk Streets, and two affordable buildings on the way along Broome Street. With these new developments, we can only expect the congregation at St. Mary’s to grow exponentially, and the need for these programs and an in-house pastor to grow with it. The communities of St. Mary’s and Our Lady of Sorrows are very distinct and well deserve their own congregations and pastors.”

“A merging of these two churches would go against the trends of residential growth and community needs in the Lower East Side, and would fracture a congregation that continues to grow in size and strength. I urge you to consider continuing the term of Father O’Connor as pastor at St. Mary’s, and to make sure that the robust programming that has supported the Lower East Side up to this point can continue to flourish under his leadership.”

While Marte’s plea for Father O’Connor wasn’t heeded—the Diocese is unbound by sentiment on such matters—the merger seems to have gone reasonably well, and St. Mary’s distinctiveness remains largely intact.

St. Mary’s pastor, and its two parochial vicars, which they share with Our Lady of Sorrows, are all Franciscans of the Capuchin order.

Belying his Irish surname, the current pastor, Fr. Thomas McNamara, is descended from Italian immigrants, one grandfather of which married an Mexican immigrant from Gaudalajara. An upstate New York native, McNamara has an agriculture degree from Cornell University, is a former high school teacher and his first assignment after ordination was at the St. Joseph the Worker Parish in East Patchogue, Long Island.

Reflecting the diversity of modern Catholicsm, the two vicars are Brother Benedecit Ayoda, known as “Brother Ben,” from Kenya and Brother Divya Karunesh, from Hassan, India.

More Than a Building

Spurred by post-merger concerns and spearheaded by the Lower East Side Preservation Initiative (LESPI), the move to landmark St. Mary’s began in earnest when LESPI filed a Request for Evaluation to LPC in July 2024.

Things move slowly in preservation-land but signals from both the Archdiocese of New York—which doesn’t object to the landmarking—and LPC are said to be positive. Whatever happens, St. Mary’s will be celebrating its bicentennial on Pentecost Sunday, May 24, 2026.

Said Council Member Marte to the LPC: “St. Mary’s Church is more than a building. It is a monument to the immigrant history of Lower Manhattan and to the generations of New Yorkers who built community here in the face of hardship and exclusion. Landmarking this church is a way of saying that history matters, and that the stories of working-class and immigrant New Yorkers deserve to be preserved, not pushed aside. I’m proud to support this designation and grateful to everyone who fought to protect this extraordinary piece of our neighborhood.”