The Church of the Transfiguration is a Roman Catholic parish located at 25 Mott Street on the northwest corner of Mosco Street in the Chinatown neighborhood of Manhattan, New York City.
The neighborhood around Mott Street in 1800 was had little to offer. The 48-acre Collect Pond, once a bucolic picnic spot was a dumping ground for the waste from nearby tanneries, breweries and slaughterhouses; creating in effect an open, rancid sewer. Despite this, a group of English Lutherans opted to build their new church in 1801 at a cost of $15.000 in the Georgian style of architecture for the “English Lutheran Church Zion.“.
On March 22, 1810, the Church was consecrated according to the rites and ceremonies of the Protestant Episcopal Church by the Reverend Benjamin Moore and renamed “Zion Protestant Episcopal Church.”
On August 31, 1815 a catastrophic fire swept through the area, destroying 35 homes and essentially gutting the church. The attempts to rebuild made by the rector, Reverend Ralph Willston, were so financially crippling that he was forced to resign in 1817 and the property was sold under foreclosure at public auction at the Tontine Coffee House on Wall Street.
Peter Lorillard purchased the building and reassured the concerned parishioners that he “would retain the property until some friends of the church would stipulate to finish rebuilding, and then restore it to its former ecclesiastical organization.” Six congregants stepped up with sizable donations, aided by a $10,000 loan from Trinity Church.
The renovated structure was completed in 1818, dedicated by Bishop Hobart on November 16.
The arrival of countless immigrant ships carrying Europe’s poor made the area around Zion Church a cesspool. Charles Dickens in 1841 thus described its horrors: “near the Tombs; Worth, Baxter, and Park Streets came together making five corners or points of varying sharpness, hence the name “Five Points.” It was an unwholesome district supplied with a few rickety buildings, and thickly populated with human beings of every age, color and condition.”
On January 28th, 1853, Zion Protestant Episcopal Church was sold to the Reverend John Hughes, of the Roman Catholic Diocese of New York. The church continued to serve the Irish, Italian and the Chinese immigrant populations in New York. It therefor became known as the “Church of Immigrants.”
In 1868, Henry Engelbert designed additions to the church, including the tower. In 1966, the building was designated by the New York City Landmarks Commission, who noted that it was one of four Georgian-Gothic landmark churches of locally quarried Manhattan schist on the Lower East Side.