Casa Moneo — 210 West 14th Street
The Spanish grocery that supplied Little Spain from 1929, and the shop every Spaniard in New York knew.
Casa Moneo opened at 210 West 14th Street in 1929 and became the commercial centre of Little Spain. It was an ultramarinos — a Spanish grocery and gift shop — though the word was always a small joke in New York, since ultramar means overseas and it was the shop itself that was overseas.
It sold what nowhere else in the city sold: the tinned goods, the preserves, the sausage, the saffron, everything da terra, as the Galicians said. Spaniards travelled in from across the five boroughs and from the suburbs to buy there.
The street it belonged to
Casa Moneo stood among La Iberia, the dress shop; the restaurants La Bilbaína, Trocadero Valencia, Bar Coruña, Café Madrid, Mesón Flamenco and Restaurante La Coruña; and La Nacional at number 239. Every July the procession of Santiago Apóstol passed its door.
For the generation that grew up on 14th Street, Casa Moneo is the shop they name first when asked what the neighbourhood was.
Gone
Casa Moneo closed. So did La Iberia, and the church of Nuestra Señora de Guadalupe, and most of the restaurants. The writer José María Carrascal, long the New York correspondent of ABC, counted its disappearance among the losses of the neighbourhood: the ultramarinos where Spaniards in New York could buy every kind of thing da terra.
The shopfront exists now in photographs. A number of them are in this film, and in no other.