Little Spain — The History of Manhattan’s Spanish Neighborhood

West 14th Street between Seventh and Eighth Avenues, from the 1860s to the end of the twentieth century.

New York had a Little Italy and a Chinatown, and it had a Little Spain. Few people know it. For roughly a century the stretch of West 14th Street between Seventh and Eighth Avenues — Calle Catorce to the people who lived there — was the centre of Spanish life in the United States, and then it disappeared almost without a trace.

At its height, between the 1920s and the 1950s, the Spanish community in New York numbered between forty and fifty thousand people, with some fifteen thousand of them in and around this neighbourhood.

Arrival

The first Spaniards came before Ellis Island existed. An industrial crisis in the north of Spain pushed families out, and they settled in Lower Manhattan — at first around Cherry Street, at the foot of the Brooklyn Bridge, above Little Italy, where by the 1940s more than seventeen hundred Spaniards were counted and where the restaurant Castilla, owned by a Galician, drew exiled politicians and Franco’s ambassadors alike. That block was demolished to build public housing.

In 1868 a group of Spaniards founded the Spanish Benevolent Society, later known as La Nacional, to support those arriving with nothing. The community gradually concentrated further north, on 14th Street, and the neighbourhood took shape around the Society’s building at number 239.

By the end of the nineteenth century Galicians and Asturians were the majority. Catalans were present early and in numbers. In 1881 the Catalan paper La Llumanera ceased publication, and shortly afterwards El Despertar, an anarchist publication edited by the Barcelona-born Pere Esteve, began. Spanish emigration reached its peak between 1905 and 1920.

The street

Fifty and more Spanish-owned businesses operated on and around the block. Casa Moneo, the grocery and gift shop at 210 West 14th Street, opened in 1929 and sold everything da terra, as the Galicians put it — the food you could not buy anywhere else in the city. La Iberia was the dress shop. The restaurants were La Bilbaína, Trocadero Valencia, Bar Coruña, Café Madrid, Mesón Flamenco, Restaurante La Coruña and the Little Spain Bar. El Faro, founded in the West Village in 1927 by Galician immigrants, was still drawing customers decades later — Marlon Brando among them.

There were textile shops, bookshops and cinemas that showed films in Spanish. The church of Nuestra Señora de Guadalupe conducted its sacraments in Spanish. Every July the feast of Santiago Apóstol, the neighbourhood’s patron saint, filled 14th Street with a procession, the Spanish answer to the feasts of Little Italy.

The 1950s and 1960s were the neighbourhood’s golden years. Spanish was spoken on the street well into that decade. Robert De Niro was living in the heart of Little Spain in the 1950s, after his parents separated.

Exile and politics

The Spanish Civil War changed the character of the community. Republicans fleeing Franco arrived and stayed, many of them remaining into the 1980s, and they shared the neighbourhood with Spaniards who held the opposite view. The tension was lived at close quarters: Republicans objected to Francoists displaying their politics openly, and the reverse was equally true. La Nacional housed both.

The Centro Vasco Americano, founded in 1913, grew out of the same community and became the origin of what is today the Euzko Etxea in Brooklyn. La Prensa, the oldest Spanish-language newspaper in the United States, was run by José Camprubí, who also headed the Unión Benéfica Española. A private bank on 14th Street collapsed in 1928, a catastrophe for the Spanish colony of the city.

Federico García Lorca spent a year in New York in the late 1920s and passed through this neighbourhood.

Disappearance

Like other immigrant neighbourhoods, Little Spain lost its force gradually. Emigration from Spain slowed and stopped. Families moved away. Businesses closed one by one. Gentrification did the rest, and 14th Street became a corridor of chain stores and subway entrances. Casa Moneo is gone. La Iberia is gone. The church is gone. The procession stopped.

In September 2026 the City of New York co-named the intersection of West 14th Street and Eighth Avenue “Little Spain–La Nacional Way”, putting the neighbourhood back on the official map.

The record

Little Spain: A Century of History assembled, for the first time, an archive that documents this neighbourhood — photographs and papers brought together across some years of work and filmed between 2009 and 2010 from inside the Society’s building on 14th Street. Eight residents and members of La Nacional give their testimony on camera. Much of what the film shows exists nowhere else and can be seen nowhere else.

Get the DVD — Little Spain: A Century of History

A unique, comprehensive archive that cannot be seen anywhere else.

Little Spain History