The Galicians of Little Spain
Thousands of Galicians passed through New York across the twentieth century. On 14th Street they were the majority.
New York took in thousands of Galicians over the course of the twentieth century, and a great many of them ended up on the block of West 14th Street known as Little Spain. By the end of the nineteenth century Galicians and Asturians had become the majority population of the neighbourhood.
There were days, as the Spanish press later put it, when the crossing with the Chelsea district spoke Galician, Castilian or Catalan.
Galician businesses on 14th Street
The shops and restaurants carried the names of home. Restaurante La Coruña stood on the block the procession of Santiago Apóstol passed through each July — Santiago being, of course, Galicia’s own. Bar Coruña, Trocadero Valencia, Casa Moneo and La Iberia were its neighbours.
El Faro was founded in the West Village in 1927 by Galician immigrants and outlived most of the street. Further downtown, at Cherry Street, the restaurant Castilla — also owned by a Galician — drew exiled politicians and Franco’s ambassadors alike for its kitchen.
At Casa Moneo a Galician could buy everything da terra: the food of home, unavailable anywhere else in the city.
La Nacional
The Spanish Benevolent Society, founded in 1868 and known as La Nacional, was where the community gathered. For Galicians arriving with no money and no English, it was the organisation that provided food, shelter, medical care and burial. Its members owned the building at 239 West 14th Street themselves.
Among those who passed through it were the poet Federico García Lorca, who lived at La Nacional for between two and five months, and the painter Joaquín Sorolla, who donated a portrait to the Society — of which only a trace now remains.
Covered by the Galician press
The documentary was followed closely in Galicia. La Opinión A Coruña returned to it three times — in November and December 2010, and again in November 2014 — reporting that Artur Balder had reconstructed the memory of the lost Spanish neighbourhood of New York that had taken in so many Galicians, through the testimony of eight residents and members of La Nacional.
- “¿Qué fue de la ‘Little Spain’?” — La Opinión A Coruña, 18 November 2010
- “Memorias de una colonia desaparecida” — La Opinión A Coruña, 5 December 2010
- “Un ‘Coruña’ en el viejo Nueva York” — La Opinión A Coruña, 18 November 2014