The 1907 church on Russell Street as captured by Google Street View, before a developer broke ground to turn it into condos.
Photo: Google Maps
When the construction fence came down this month outside the old Lutheran church on McGolrick Park, Greenpoint seemed to let out a collective gasp. The exterior had been brutalized: The stained glass was gone; the gray stone had been replaced by a flat expanse of concrete. And most sinfully, a central window — right over the front entrance — was off–center. Far, far off-center, as if a toddler had drawn it. “An affront to god,” as one person put it.
The design was a knife twist for neighbors who had rallied in 2023 to save the building from demolition and went to court to block its sale to developers. The congregation behind the 1907 church had, in 2014, handed the building to a “post-denominational” pastor to use as a kind of progressive public space. In the years since, it had served day cares and day raves. When the local library closed, it housed the books. When the production of a play upstairs meant leftover food, a crew member brought it down to the soup kitchen. “This was one space that was somewhat insulated from the madness of development that is going on in the neighborhood,” activist Jamie Hook told the City in 2023. Preserving it as a community space was a long shot, he knew, but “I just simply move forward with the understanding that if we do nothing, we know what happens.”
The judge sided with the community, but activists failed to raise the cash. In the end, it sold for $4.7 million to a developer who wanted a condo conversion — which seemed better than razing the site. Plus: Other developers had tastefully turned church buildings into enviable homes, such as the 2014 conversion of the Catholic church on North 6th Street in Williamsburg, the transformation of a 19th-century parish house on East 16th Street into luxury condos, and the conversion of a Baptist church on the Upper West Side that left the old church “untouched, only cleaner and less crumbly,” as my colleague Justin Davidson put it.
Renderings at the job site had shown a façade with a lot more of the church details intact, as the New York Post reported. (Though the window is still off, and for some reason the stone had been replaced with red brick.) And the team behind it seemed invested in making the place look cool. The building sold to GW Russell LLC, a developer, and Sara Rottenberg, an influencer who founded a talent agency for other Dutch influencers in 2019, according to the daily paper Trouw, and flew in and out of the U.S. as she managed their careers before selling the company in 2022. Per Greenpointers, Rottenberg was taking her skill for video content to the church conversion by filming TikTok reels about the work behind the scenes. (She has since made those videos and her Instagram posts private, but Google has cached her descriptions of Reels showing an “inspiring journey of converting a church,” one of which was posted with the hashtag #trusttheproccess.)
A rep for the developer told Greenpointers that “the group was committed to preserving the building’s unique character and long-standing presence wherever possible” and had “kept the structure as much as possible as is.” But the rep also added that the building isn’t done and that “things such as window placements” were still “in progress.” God willing.