St. Elisabeth of Hungary Church Undergoing Demolition on E. 83rd St.

The demolition of the historic 130 year-old St. Elisabeth of Hungary Church at 213 E. 83rd St., between Second and Third Avenues, is well underway.

The developer AVENU wants to erect a seven-story luxury condominium building there, after purchasing the church’s underlying plot from the New York Archdiocese for $11.8 million.

The church dates back to 1893, and has not been in usage since 2014, when then-Archbishop Timothy Dolan moved its services to the Church of St. Monica on E. 79th St.

The facade of the church has already been demolished, as the real estate blog New York YIMBY reported on Feb. 24, projecting that the entire building would be razed to the ground by late spring.

A visit to the site by Our Town on Mar. 4 confirmed this, with the guts of the church visible through a screen looking in on the construction site. The building has since been heavily swaddled in extensive scaffolding.

The preservationist group Friends of the Upper East Side argued that the demolition is leaving “another piece of Yorkville’s history shattered.” They point out that the church once served as a “spiritual home and cultural cornerstone” for Slovak and German immigrants in the neighborhood, and served as a hub of working-class community-building.

“When market forces consistently outweigh cultural memory, when regulatory frameworks fail to recognize everyday heritage, and when opportunities for thoughtful adaptation are ignored, the neighborhood loses more than buildings,” the nonprofit group wrote on Feb. 26.

Nonetheless, the preservationist group clarifies that they have already failed to secure landmark status for the church; they submitted such a request to the Landmarks Preservation Commission in 2024, which was “ultimately denied,” with the LPC citing the church’s “modest scale, mid-block location, and unremarkable architectural style.”

The luxury condo building that Avenu ultimately wants to create will span 21,171 sq. ft., and will only contain eight or nine units. The developer will be able to build a relatively tall tower after acquiring air rights from the owner of the property next door, at 211 E. 83rd St.

Friends of the Upper East Side continues to express disappointment that their suggestion for transforming the church via “adaptive reuse”—a technical term for reusing a historic building for a new purpose— has been disregarded. One such use could have even been housing, they say, as long as it was situated within the existing church structure itself.

When it first opened in the 19th century, the church was known as the Second Immanuel German Evangelical Lutheran Church, eventually becoming St. Elisabeth of Hungary Church after more Slovak worshippers arrived and the Archdiocese purchased the church from the Lutheran congregation.

As Friends of the Upper East Side notes, the soon-to-be-demolished church displays a mix of Victorian Gothic and Roman Catholic architectural styles. Its patron saint, a princess from the Kingdom of Hungary who lived in the 13th century, is renowned by the Catholic faithful for using her dowry to build a hospital for the sick when she was a young widow.

The church was perhaps best known to contemporary locals for its services catering to the city’s deaf Catholic community, particularly under the leadership of Monsignor Patrick McCahill, who created a famed weekly mass held in American Sign Language and a deaf choir.