14th Street — Calle Catorce
The businesses, the church and the procession on the block between Seventh and Eighth Avenues.
Little Spain was one block long. West 14th Street between Seventh and Eighth Avenues — Calle Catorce to the people who lived and worked on it — carried more than fifty Spanish-owned businesses at its height, and a density of Spanish life that existed nowhere else in the United States.
The street crosses Manhattan from river to river. This one stretch of it, at the edge between Chelsea and the West Village, was where Spaniards arriving in New York went first.
The shops
Casa Moneo opened at 210 West 14th Street in 1929 and was the centre of the street’s commerce. It was an ultramarinos — a Spanish grocery — though the name was a joke on the geography, since the shop itself was the thing overseas. It sold what no other shop in New York carried: the tinned goods, the preserves, the sausage, everything da terra, as the Galicians said. Spaniards came in from across the city and the suburbs to buy there.
La Iberia was the clothing shop, known across New York. There were textile shops, bookshops, and cinemas that ran films in Spanish into the 1960s.
A private bank operated on 14th Street until its collapse in 1928 — a disaster for the Spanish colony of the city, which had placed its savings there.
The restaurants
The restaurants carried the names of the places the community came from: La Bilbaína, Trocadero Valencia, Bar Coruña, Restaurante La Coruña, Café Madrid, Mesón Flamenco, and the Little Spain Bar. El Faro, founded by Galician immigrants in the West Village in 1927, outlived most of them and counted Marlon Brando among its customers.
Below the Spanish Benevolent Society at 239 West 14th Street, La Nacional’s own restaurant fed the community for decades.
The church and the procession
The church of Nuestra Señora de Guadalupe served the neighbourhood in Spanish — masses, baptisms, first communions, weddings. For the Spanish families of 14th Street it was the parish, and it has since disappeared.
Each July the feast of Santiago Apóstol, patron saint of the neighbourhood, brought a procession down 14th Street, past Trocadero Valencia and Casa Moneo and La Iberia. It was Little Spain’s answer to the feast days of Little Italy, and it continued into the 1990s.
What is left
Casa Moneo is gone. La Iberia is gone. The church is gone. The procession stopped. The block became a corridor of chain stores and subway entrances, and almost nothing of the Spanish street is visible from the pavement.
In September 2026 the intersection of 14th Street and Eighth Avenue was co-named Little Spain–La Nacional Way.
The documentary recorded the street from the inside, at La Nacional, between 2009 and 2010 — the photographs, the documents, and the testimony of eight people who had lived it.