Holy Rosary was founded in 1884 to serve the German and Irish Catholics then settling near the East River. As East Harlem changed, the church changed with it: Italian immigrants established a second congregation in the building, and later the parish increasingly served Spanish-speaking residents. The present church was built in 1898 and dedicated in 1900. More than a century later, as New York consolidated Catholic parishes, Holy Rosary closed in 2015 and was deconsecrated two years later.

I originally went because I'd heard the church's pipe organs were still there. Abandoned buildings have become increasingly rare in Manhattan—land is simply too valuable—so it was very different from the New York I began exploring in the 1970s. While we were inside, we ran into some teenage explorers who had come to look around too. I brought my drone, as I did at Iglesia Evangélica Los Peregrinos and Temple B'nai Abraham, because old churches were designed to make people look upward. Congregants looking toward God saw these spectacular ceilings and architecture above them, and the drone let me photograph the buildings from something closer to that perspective.