c. 1996 Religion News Service
NEW YORK _ Nestled in the canyons of Wall Street, where narrow sidewalks bend in the shadows cast by buildings rising to spectacular heights, sits the unlikely progenitor of Manhattan’s famed financial district _ the parish of Trinity Church.
From its inception in 1697, when England’s King William III granted the charter for New York City’s first Anglican church, Trinity’s unique place in American history was secured. President George Washington worshiped there when New York served as the capital of the new nation. Alexander Hamilton, the country’s first treasury secretary, is buried in the churchyard next to soldiers who served in the Revolutionary War.
But perhaps of even more lasting consequence is the church’s continuing ministry to the titans of finance and commerce, many of whom toil in offices built on land once owned by the church.”Hundreds of them, I guess, every day step inside for a moment of quiet, of peace, of _ perhaps _ prayer,”said the Rev. Daniel Paul Matthews, rector of Trinity Church. Because the church is located in a business district, Matthews explained,”we don’t have the same kind of neighborhood structure as a (typical) parish, so we would like to serve our constituents _ the financial people _ in our neighborhood.” As Trinity marks its 300th year as a parish with a flurry of programs and activities, it also celebrates the 150th anniversary of its current church building, a neo-gothic gem conceived by Robert Upjohn, the English cabinet-maker who went on to become one of the New World’s celebrated architects.
Upjohn’s sandstone monument to divine majesty is the third Trinity to grace the famous plot where Wall Street meets Broadway in Gotham’s frantic downtown. The first fell to a fire that swept New York City in 1776, and the second to Upjohn’s own pronouncement that its snow-damaged roof was irreparable.
Architect and preservationist Paul Spencer Byard, writing in Trinity News, the church’s quarterly magazine, says it was Upjohn’s design _ which features a 22-story tower _ that set off New York’s race for the sky.
At the time the church was completed in 1846, Byard says, Trinity’s tower stood as the city’s tallest structure. With the fame he earned from Trinity’s leap toward the heavens, Upjohn went on to found the American Institute of Architects.
To the casual observer, Trinity appears as an oasis of peaceful quaintness _ an impression that belies its temporal power as one of the city’s largest commercial landlords.
In 1705, Queen Anne bestowed on Trinity a grant of 215 acres, in what would become lower Manhattan, for an annual rent of”one peppercorne.”(When Queen Elizabeth II visited Trinity in 1976, she was presented with symbolic back-rent of 279 peppercorns.)
The church, in turn, granted some of the land to the 70 parishes it founded, as well as to other institutions, such as a newly founded Kings College _ later to become Columbia University. And much of the land was sold.
But commercially significant plots remain in parish hands, according to Joseph P. Palombi, the church’s executive vice president for real estate, making Trinity one of the city’s key landowners.
The church still owns some 27 commercial properties in downtown New York, says Palombi. In press material, Trinity acknowledges owning some 6 million square feet of office, retail and manufacturing space. Though church officials decline to reveal income figures generated by the real estate, a conservative estimate based on average costs per square foot in New York suggests rental income could exceed $60 million annually _ a hefty supplement to an endowment that’s been growing for three centuries.
In addition to its Manhattan stake, the church also owns a modern conference facility that can accommodate 60 overnight guests in the bucolic countryside outside New York.
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Trinity occupies a unique place in the Episcopal Diocese of New York, which is best known for its Cathedral of St. John the Divine, the largest gothic cathedral in the world.
The Episcopal Church is the U.S. branch of the worldwide Anglican Communion.
Trinity is the richest church among the 202 parishes that form the diocese, and its contribution accounts for 25 percent of the $5 million diocesan budget, according to Michael McPherson, chief administrative officer for the Diocese of New York.
The 25 percent figure is the result of a cap self-imposed by the diocese, McPherson explained, so that the diocese would not become overly dependent on the largesse of its oldest church.
Throughout its history, Trinity has used its steady river of income for good works such as the education of the poor, outreach to the city’s immigrant population and shelter for the homeless.
Since 1971, Trinity’s grants program has dispensed more than $46 million to some 1,300 recipients for projects such as the anti-apartheid efforts of now-retired Anglican Archbishop Desmond Tutu of South Africa, and the construction of affordable housing in the poorer boroughs of New York.
Recently, the church has turned its resources to promoting the discussions of big ideas through its Trinity Institute and its communications projects. Equipped with a full television studio, Trinity has already collected several Emmy awards for a self-produced documentary and a dramatization of a short story, and even won for a game show called”Inspiration, Please”that airs on the Faith & Values cable channel.
Trinity will mark its 300th year with an ecumenical program called”New Ways of Knowing,”in which the grand schemes of God and nature will be discussed with some of the top names on Wall Street.
This year, the church also plans to launch a magazine on religious matters for the general public.”Because of our endowment,”said Matthews,”we feel called to help more fundamental directional setting. … We need to be on the growing edge of setting the agenda for the way we’re going to think in the future.”(END OPTIONAL TRIM)
As Trinity seeks to position itself as a thought leader in the 21st century, it is building on a rich historical and intellectual heritage that dates back to the very roots of an independent America.
After his inauguration as the nation’s first president, George Washington proceeded to St. Paul’s Chapel, part of the Trinity parish, for a service of thanksgiving. While the capital remained in New York, Washington attended Trinity services regularly.
Alexander Hamilton, the master capitalist and industrialist of the Founding Fathers, was a controversial parishioner whose very death posed a dilemma for the Rev. Benjamin Moore, then the rector. As Hamilton lay dying in his New York home in 1804, Moore hesitated before going to his bedside. Hamilton’s impending demise was the result of a gun duel fought with the infamous Aaron Burr on the west bank of the Hudson River, a practice Moore denounced as barbaric and immoral.
In a letter to the editor of The Boston Gazette encased in glass in Trinity’s museum, Moore reports on Hamilton’s final hours and the promise he exacted from the 47-year-old founder _ that if he lived, Hamilton would go on the hustings to speak against dueling.
Not only is Trinity rich in popular history, its design and structure reflect a profound intellectual history as well.
Upjohn’s Trinity building is a product of the British Oxford Movement, a 19th-century Anglican initiative aimed at restoring High Church ideals. The movement, according to the Rev. Frederic Burnham, who presides over the Trinity Institute, was born of a backlash against both the cool classicism of the Enlightenment and the evangelical fervor sweeping the Protestant world in the 1800s.
In what was termed”radical orthodoxy,”the leaders of the Oxford movement sought to restore the elaborate liturgical and architectural forms of the past to Episcopalian and Anglican church life as a means of renewing a sense of spiritual wonder.
Many of the Enlightenment minds of Trinity’s parishioners chafed at the precepts of the Oxford movement; according to architect Byard, they found the return to catholic traditions disconcertingly papist in flavor.
Nonetheless, Upjohn’s Oxford sympathies are in full flower in the church, described by architecture critic Brendan Gill as”exuberantly gothic.” Yet Upjohn’s gothic sensibility conveys itself not only through its crisp, elongated sense of proportion, but also through an architectural sleight-of-hand. The church’s buttresses are merely decorative, as is the elaborate vaulted ceiling, which turns out to be formed of plaster, not stone.
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Today Upjohn’s creation houses a lively multi-racial congregation of some 1,000 souls. The church is designated a National Landmark by the National Park Service and is open to the public for daily tours through the church and its museum.
In addition to the Trinity Institute’s”New Ways of Knowing”project, the church will celebrate its 300th year with a series of concerts, the creation of a time capsule to be buried in the church yard for the next 100 years, and the production of an oral-history video featuring Trinity’s parishioners. The celebration will culminate with a visit in May 1997 by the Most Rev. George L. Carey, Archbishop of Canterbury, the primate of the Anglican Church.
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Trinity’s survival as a living parish and power player on the national and international scenes over three centuries is regarded by some to be nothing short of a modern miracle.”Both literally and figuratively,”Gill told parishioners and dignitaries assembled in the church nave,”Trinity stands for steadfastness in a culture devoted to the transitory.”
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