New York City landmark: St. Paul's chapel

In 1766, New York City reached north to City Hall Park, then called The Commons. That year, Trinity Church provided St. Paul’s as a “Chapel of Ease” for its parishioners living on the northern border of the city near Fulton Street. The land beneath the church only a year earlier was a wheat field sloping to the Hudson River. St. Paul’s Chapel is today Manhattan’s only pre-Revolutionary church building and the building longest in public use.

An architectural oddity is the church’s orientation: Built to face the Hudson River, its back is to Broadway, so that its original rear entrance is today its main entrance. The chapel was designed after St. Martin’s-in-the-Fields in London. Several architects had a part in its overall rendering, including Andrew Gautier and James Crommelin Lawrence, and possibly Thomas McBean, a protégé of James Gibbs, who designed the London church.

It was built of the native stone quarried from the churchyard known as Manhattan schist, and used with brownstone. The west end of the building on Church Street, now the rear entry, contains the church spire; while the east end, a very early replacement of the original rear entry, was designed as a carriage portico. Still, to the modern eye, this temple-front portico with giant Ionic columns is graceful and impressive. A niche above the portico holds an American Primitive hand-carved statue of Saint Paul.

The spire was added in 1794 to the 1766 square masonry tower. The wooden steeple was painted white. The decorative trim of the brownstone walls of the building was also highlighted in white paint. In 1840, the steeple and trim were painted to match the brownstone and eventually the spire was coated in copper sheeting. The finial of the tower carries a gilt weathervane atop a replica of the Choragic Monument of Lysicrates in Athens.

A handsome wrought iron fence erected in 1827 encircles the entire chapel and churchyard. The fence replaced a high brick wall that had enclosed the yard since 1805. In 1812, the brick wall had built into its north and southwest corners two houses for volunteer fire companies, reflecting the city’s constant anxiety over the danger of fire. In 1776, and again in 1832, over a thousand buildings burned in a single conflagration. The small firehouses in St. Paul’s wall contained Engine Companies 39 and 14, formed in 1812.

Trinity Church, which had been built in 1696, burned in minutes in the great fire of 1776, its ruins were razed in 1789, and a new church built in 1790. The present Trinity Church was built in 1841. Its churchyard holds many graves of the Revolutionary Era, including Alexander Hamilton’s, Albert Gallatin’s, and William Bradford’s. St. Paul’s escaped a similar fate only barely, when the fire burned itself out in the empty lots bordering the churchyard north and west. British authorities commandeered churches of all denominations as refugee centers and to quarter troops, except for St. Paul’s and St. George’s, another Trinity chapel.

Because of Trinity’s burning, St. Paul’s Chapel on Broadway took on primary importance to Anglicans of the city. However, the most scandalous association to St. Paul’s in the British occupation was the use of church-owned land to the west as a prostitution sector called, appropriately, the Holy Ground. Apparently, some of these neighbors attended services at the Chapel. A visitor to St. Paul’s in the day remarked, “This is a very neat church and some of the handsomest and best-dressed ladies I have seen in America. I believe most of them are whores.”

During the British occupation in the Revolutionary War years, Generals Cornwallis and Howe attended services at St. Paul’s Chapel. On November 25, 1783, American General George Washington is supposed to have led a parade past St. Paul’s during his triumphal retaking of the city. Throughout the 19th century, New Yorkers gathered at the corner of Broadway and Ann Street to commemorate this storied event; although there isn’t conclusive proof it actually happened.

A special Thanksgiving service was certainly held on April 30, 1789 in honor of Washington’s inauguration. Following the ceremony at Federal Hall, in which nobody remembered to bring a Bible, the new President and both houses of Congress walked to St. Paul’s. President George Washington, in the two years in which New York was the national capital, regularly attended St. Paul’s and his pew in the north aisle is preserved as a tourist attraction. The first image, an oil painting, of the Great Seal of the United States hangs over Washington’s pew. In 1799, a memorial service was held at St. Paul’s to mark George Washington’s death and James Monroe’s funeral was held there in 1831.

The first Revolutionary War monument constructed in this country was in honor of Brigadier General Richard Montgomery who was killed at Quebec in 1775 and buried beneath the east porch of St. Paul’s. Benjamin Franklin commissioned the monument on behalf of the Second Continental Congress and the sculpture was erected in 1789 on the Broadway side of the church.

The spacious churchyard on three sides of the church is a blessing that permits sunshine to reach into the pastel-painted interior, pink walls and a blue-green ceiling, despite the property being wedged in by skyscrapers. The barrel-vaulted room has galleries running along two sides supported by columns and is lit by fourteen Waterford cut glass chandeliers. The golden sunburst over the high altar is thought to have been designed by Pierre L’Enfant, architect of Federal Hall on Wall Street.

Today St. Paul's is again a Chapel of Ease as an entirely new residential district grows up around it.

The churchyard is a shady oasis in the hustle and bustle of the Financial District and office workers and executives alike can be seen at lunch hour studying moss-covered tombstones.

Daily services are conducted for business people and visitors. Regular concerts for the public are also held in the church on weekdays. St. Paul’s Chapel and Churchyard together were designated a New York City Landmark in 1966.