Emmanuel Spanish Baptist Church

256 East 4th Street | East Village | built 1900

Open on the map4 entries

The lot about 1940
About 1940. Via 1940s.nyc
The lot about 1985
About 1985. Via 80s.nyc

The city photographed every building for its tax records around 1940 and again in the 1980s. NYC Municipal Archives.

Written with AI from the source each entry cites, then fact-checked.

  1. 1925

    The Lemberger Congregation builds a synagogue on East 4th Street

    The Lemberger Congregation, named for the city of Lemberg (today Lviv), buys the tenement buildings on the lot and hires architect James J. Millman to design a new synagogue. The red brick building has Gothic arches over its openings, projecting brickwork, separate entrances for men and women, and a stone Decalogue set into the parapet.

    Source: Daytonian in Manhattan

  2. 1926

    October 28

    Leon Stand dies soon after the Lemberger synagogue is built

    Tammany assemblyman Leon Stand, president of the Lemberger Congregation, is a driving force behind the new East 4th Street synagogue. The congregation honors him at a dinner in the fall of 1926, and he falls ill soon afterward. Stand dies on October 28, 1926, at age 58.

    Source: Daytonian in Manhattan

  3. 1939

    January 28

    Gunmen rob a benevolent society meeting in the building

    Four gunmen hold up a meeting of the Lemberg Sech Benevolent Society on the fourth floor, making off with roughly $300 in dues plus cash and jewelry. Police arrest two young men, who are sentenced to 10 to 30 years at Dannemora, but an investigation later finds one of them was misidentified, and a judge clears him in July 1940.

    Source: Daytonian in Manhattan

  4. 1970

    The synagogue becomes Iglesia Bautista Emmanuel church

    Around 1970 the former Lemberger synagogue becomes home to Iglesia Bautista Emmanuel, a Spanish-language congregation also called Emmanuel Spanish Baptist Church. In August 1976 the church is broken into and desecrated, the first of a string of attacks on Hispanic evangelical churches in the neighborhood. A civic group says such churches are vulnerable because they are new to the area. A Christian cross in the rondel now sits beneath the same Decalogue the synagogue displayed.

    Source: Daytonian in Manhattan

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