That old stone church on the corner is the Church of the Transfiguration, and it has been standing here, on this exact spot, since eighteen oh-one. In New York terms, that's basically the Bronze Age — older than the Erie Canal, older than the Bill of Rights getting its ink dry. But the building is not the interesting part. The interesting part is who's been inside it, and how many times they've completely swapped out.
It went up as a Protestant church, built by English Lutherans, back when this was a genteel corner of a young city. Then, in the eighteen fifties, it became a Roman Catholic church — because the neighborhood had filled up with Irish families fleeing the potato famine, and the Irish were, at that exact moment, the immigrants all of New York had decided to be terrified of. Cartoons in the papers drew them as apes. Signs in shop windows said no Irish need apply. And they packed into this church by the thousand.
Then the Italians started arriving around the turn of the cent
ury, and something depressingly human happened. The Irish, who had only just clawed their way up off the bottom rung, took one look at the newer, poorer, differently-Catholic Italians and found someone to stand on.
Because one detail tells you the whole story. When the Italian Catholics started coming to this church, the Irish congregation would not let them worship in the main sanctuary upstairs
