Plans have been filed to destroy one of the East Village’s few remaining tenement synagogues, the 100-year-old 256 East 4th Street (Avenues B and C), which was converted to a church in the 1970s. Six very expensive apartments will replace the historic house of worship. According to plans filed and images posted on the site, the development will completely destroy the existing facade, while adding two stories.

Building uses do change over the years — many of these narrow East Village churches and synagogues themselves replaced or reused existing housing. So while we lament the loss of neighborhood institutions, we welcome thoughtful adaptive reuse of historic buildings, including to housing. In fact, other historic houses of worship in the neighborhood have been sensitively converted to housing and other uses (including with additions) when the existing congregation could no longer support the space. But that’s not what’s happening here.

Why? Because this building, like most of the East Village, enjoys no landmark protections, in spite of its incredibly rich history. And this doesn’t have to be the case. This century-old building lies within an area Village Preservation and fellow neighborhood and preservation organizations proposed to the City’s Landmarks Preservation Commission for historic district designation in 2019, and which the Commission at the time promised to consider. They never did, and there has been no expansion of landmark protections in the East Village since 2012, when Village Preservation secured landmark designation of 128 East 13th Street. In an area so rich in history and so underrepresented in landmark designations, where so many other historic buildings have also been lost, this shouldn’t be so.

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