Evicted Harlem Church Finds A New Home: 'We Didn't Have Any Choice'

HARLEM, NY — More than three years after the city began evicting it from its longtime home, Harlem's last remaining Ethiopian Orthodox church has found a new place to worship — but it still means being displaced from the neighborhood.

In recent days, members of Beaata Le Mariam Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church have packed up nearly all of the furnishings and religious icons that adorned their storefront home on the corner of West 121st Street and Adam Clayton Powell, Jr. Boulevard since 2006.

Their destination: 200 Cypress Ave. in the South Bronx, where the church has found a new location for its few dozen congregants. The space, formerly home to another church and later a kickboxing studio, was referred to Beaata Le Mariam by a supporter, and is owned by the nonprofit Acacia Network.

Beaata Le Mariam had little choice but to accept the new digs: a judge had ordered them to vacate the Harlem space within weeks.

"We didn’t have any choice — we were in the box," said Almaz Kebede, the church's board chair. "Otherwise they will throw [out] our stuff and no one could help us at all."

Pleas for help

The move to the Bronx will be the end of an era for the Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church, an ancient institution that established a presence in Harlem in the 1950s — just as it started making inroads in the United States.

It also signals the end of a long ordeal for Beaata Le Mariam, which began in 2019 when its landlord at the time — the city's housing department — ordered them out of their 3,500-square-foot space in Harlem, without explanation.

The reason, they soon learned, was that the city had reached a deal to sell the building for $1 to a community land trust, which would renovate it and convert it to permanently affordable housing. The nonprofit land trust became the church's new landlord by late 2020 and continued the eviction proceedings.

A leader of the nonprofit handling the building's renovations explained that the church could not return to its home because the land trust needed a retail tenant willing to pay more than the church's $1,267 monthly rent, in order to help subsidize the affordable apartments.

"We've never had any indication from the church that they'd be willing to pay anything," Kenneth Wray, executive director of the nonprofit CATCH, told Patch in March.

Lawyers for the church won months of extensions thanks to the state's pandemic eviction moratorium — but that ban expired in January, allowing evictions to resume.

The land trust's takeover of the Harlem building was celebrated by housing advocates, who called it a historic step that could help create a new model for affordable housing. Evicting the church, however, put the land trust in an awkward spot — the nonprofit's board of directors said in March that they were "sympathetic to the church," and had been left "in a difficult position."

Some Harlem clergy reached out with offers of help, including the Rev. Malcolm Byrd of Mother AME Zion Church and Rev. Calvin Butts of Abyssinian Baptist Church, but timing and space constraints made it impossible for Beaata to share a venue with them, according to board member Atsede Elegba.

Meanwhile, church leaders got few responses when they sent pleas to local elected officials, including a letter to then-Mayor Bill de Blasio. After Patch began reporting on the eviction, de Blasio pledged to help last April — but the city ultimately offered the church just two vacant spaces that were either too small or too expensive.

"No one cares," Kebede said.

"God will be on our side"

The Bronx location is fairly affordable, at $2,000 per month. While it lacks a priest's quarters and some other amenities that the Harlem space had, the main sanctuary is "very big and light," and congregants have reacted warmly to it, Kebede said.

Still, the departure from Harlem has been "really sad," according to Elegba, who now wonders whether Beaata Le Mariam could have avoided displacement by establishing deeper ties in the neighborhood.

"It should be a lesson learned: if we’d been more involved in the community, maybe things would’ve turned out differently," she said.

Beaata Le Mariam plans to maintain a presence in Harlem by organizing events, and would gladly move back to the neighborhood if a place became available, Elegba said. Within five years, the church hopes to purchase a permanent home.

Looking back at the three-year eviction battle, Elegba said any bitterness is outweighed by gratitude that her congregation — which in past years included nearly 100 parishioners hailing from across the U.S., Caribbean, and Eastern Africa — remains mostly intact.

"If we didn’t find a place in the Bronx, the church would’ve disintegrated," she said.

Kebede said she fears the Bronx location may not be accessible to all members, like the Columbia University students who used to walk from campus to the Harlem church. But she, too, vowed that the church would endure.

"We believe that God will be on our side and we will survive," she said.

Related coverage:

• Harlem Church To Be Evicted In City's Affordable Housing Deal
• Harlem's Endangered Ethiopian Church Hangs On, For Now
  
• Treasured Harlem Church Facing Eviction Fears The End Is Near

Have a Harlem news tip? Contact reporter Nick Garber at nick.garber@patch.com.