Church of the Transfiguration

An 1801 church that has served Lutherans, the Irish, Italians and Chinese in turn

Local name: Church of the Transfiguration

Collection: The Lower East Side and Chinatown · USA · Open in OpenStreetMap

The Church of the Transfiguration on Mott Street · Beyond My Ken, CC BY-SA 4.0, Wikimedia Commons

The story

Before you is the Church of the Transfiguration, the oldest building in the Chinatown and Little Italy Historic District. English Lutherans built it in 1801. The walls are rough stone, like those of St. Paul’s Chapel on Broadway. Later the congregation became Episcopalian. In 1815 the building burned out and was rebuilt. In 1853 the Catholic parish of the Transfiguration bought the church. That parish was founded by a Cuban priest, Félix Varela. He was born on the twentieth of November 1788 in Cuba. In the Spanish parliament Varela called for self-rule for Cuba and an end to slavery, and the Spanish Crown sentenced him to death. In December 1823 he escaped to New York. Here Varela gathered a parish of poor Irish immigrants, opened a school and taught people to read. His temperance society had more than a thousand members. Varela died on the twenty-fifth of February 1853 in Florida, the same year his parish moved here. The eight-sided, copper-clad bell tower was added in 1868. The congregation changed along with the neighborhood: first Irish, then Italian, and since the middle of the twentieth century, Chinese. Today Mass is said in English, Cantonese and Mandarin. In 2012 the Vatican declared Varela Venerable, one of the steps on the road to sainthood.

Visiting

29 Mott Street, at the corner of Mosco Street, Chinatown. An active Catholic church; the Mass schedule is on the parish website. A plaque honoring Félix Varela is by the entrance.