From Mission House To Mannequin Factory To Arts Space, The Many Lives Of A Broome Street Building

On a Belgian block section of Broome Street east of the Bowery sits a four-story, late 19th century building—hiding its long and wide-ranging history behind a blonde brick facade.

Flanked by a tenement on one side and a newer apartment house on the other, the building’s unique features offer hints at its original purpose.

There’s a peaked roof, twin chimneys, and a horseshoe-shaped front door that gives the impression the building was originally a stable—which wouldn’t be surprising at the time in this stretch of the Lower East Side, where tenements, factories, shops, and stables crowded together on slender, densely populated blocks.

But instead of housing horses, 330 Broome Street was constructed with a holier mission in mind: saving souls.

This unusual structure, completed in 1895, was the home of God’s Providence Mission, a branch of the New York Protestant Episcopal Mission Society.

Incorporated in 1833, the Society’s early goal was to provide free churches where poor New Yorkers wouldn’t have to pay for a pew, according to a 1959 article in The Witness, as was the custom in most churches at the time.

The Society shifted its focus and eventually maintained mission houses at 359 Broome Street, Mulberry Street, West 63rd Street, and West 99th Street while conducting mission work in hospitals, asylums, and prisons.

What was the purpose of a mission house? Run by church parishes or religious benevolent societies, they popped up on the cityscape in the mid-19th century to address growing social ills personified by out-of-work men, “fallen” women, and children who worked or lived on the streets.

Think of them as private social service agencies with a physical home base offering food, shelter, education, and religion, led by clergymen and churchwomen and funded in part by wealthy donors.

The God’s Providence Mission was important enough to attract the city’s top clergy to its opening ceremony on November 5, 1895. None other than Henry Potter, bishop of the Episcopal Diocese of New York, dedicated the Mission—which was a gift of Mrs. Percy R. Pyne, the wife of a prominent banker, who donated property she owned on Broome Street.

The Sun detailed the dedication in an article the next day, noting that a service was held in the chapel on the building’s ground floor. “The work will be typical East Side mission work,” wrote the Sun.

“In the basement will be a cooking school,” continued the Sun. “On the street floor are the chapel and smaller assembly rooms, in which various boys’ and girls’ clubs will meet. The second and third floors will be occupied by the kindergarten. On the fourth floor will be a gymnasium.”

From the description, this sounds more like an industrial school, a facility run by charities that proliferated in tenement districts at the turn of the century. At these schools, poor children could get a basic education and learn skills that would help them land a job.

Mission houses and industrial schools began to close in the early decades of the 20th century. When God’s Providence Mission shut its doors isn’t clear; in the third photo, from about 1940, you can see what looks like the organization’s insignia over the door.

What took over the building in the 1920s would have been familiar to neighborhood residents: a factory. Founded by Rabbi Meyer Goldsmith in 1927 soon after he immigrated to the U.S. from Russia, the factory made mannequins. It was a family business with four Goldsmith brothers participating, according to Eric Feigenbaum’s 2024 book, Profiles of the Mannequin.

The mannequin factory continued for several decades. (Above ad from 1968.) Did it still exist at 330 Broome Street past the 1960s? It doesn’t seem so.

In the 1970s, the building transformed (and lost its lovely bishop’s crook lamppost) into an avant-garde arts space hosted by experimental artist Arleen Schloss, whose work encompassed “performance art, sound poetry, video, digital multimedia, and other hard-to-categorize creative genres,” according to a 2011 post on The Lo-Down.

Like so much of the city, the Lower East Side in the 1970s was an area of neglected blocks and abandoned buildings. Artists took advantage of the lower rents; the Lo-Down states that Schloss moved in to 330 Broome in 1970. Soon, a movement dubbed No Wave flourished.

“Schloss’ base, a loft, at 330 Broome Street, between Bowery and Chrystie, was a locus of artistic ferment in the form of weekly gatherings dubbed ‘Wednesday’s at A’s,’ where a slew of artists and musicians performed including Jean-Michel Basquiat and his band Gray, Thurston Moore, Glenn Branca, Phoebe Legere and Eric Bogosian, Richard Hambleton, Elliott Sharp and Alan Vega aka Alan Suicide before, and just as they hit,” continued The Lo-Down.

The Lo-Down article is 14 years old, but at the time it was published, 330 Broome Street had transitioned once again, this time into a refurbished co-op residence. The pricey loft units befitted a revitalized neighborhood of restaurants, bars, and galleries.

How pricey? This recent listing for a unit in the former mission building, now co-op apartment house, runs more than $3 million. I wonder what the clergy in charge of God’s Providence Mission would have thought about that.

[Third photo: NYC Department of Records & Information Services; fifth photo: The Daily Sentinel; sixth photo: The Lo-Down]