Little Spain–La Nacional Way
In September 2026 New York City co-named West 14th Street and Eighth Avenue after the neighbourhood and the Society at its centre.
On 21 September 2026 the City of New York officially co-named the intersection of West 14th Street and Eighth Avenue as “Little Spain–La Nacional Way”. A neighbourhood that had effectively vanished from the city’s map returned to it, on a street sign, at the corner where it once ended.
The co-naming honours the generations of Spanish immigrants who, between the late nineteenth century and the end of the twentieth, built a community on the block between Seventh and Eighth Avenues — and La Nacional, the Spanish Benevolent Society founded in 1868, whose building at 239 West 14th Street was its centre.
The announcement was carried across the Spanish press and by the broadcasters, and reported in New York by Time Out and others. The Consulate General of Spain in New York marked it publicly.
What the sign commemorates
Little Spain never became as widely known as Little Italy or Chinatown, but it had its own dense world of restaurants, shops, religious institutions and social clubs. La Bilbaína, Trocadero Valencia, Bar Coruña, Café Madrid, Mesón Flamenco and El Faro served the community. La Iberia supplied Spanish clothing. Casa Moneo, the Spanish food and gift shop, opened at 210 West 14th Street in 1929. The church of Nuestra Señora de Guadalupe held its services in Spanish, and the feast of Santiago Apóstol brought a procession through the street each July.
Between the 1920s and the 1950s the Spanish community in New York numbered forty to fifty thousand people, some fifteen thousand of them in this neighbourhood. By the close of the century the businesses had closed and the families had dispersed.
Recorded sixteen years before the street sign
The documentary Little Spain: A Century of History was filmed at La Nacional between 2009 and 2010 and released in 2011. It assembled, for the first time, an archive documenting the neighbourhood the 2026 co-naming commemorates — photographs and papers never previously brought together — and recorded the testimony of eight residents and members of the Society while they were still able to give it.
What the street sign names, the film had already documented.