The tallest building in New York until 1890, now dwarfed at the end of Wall Street, with Alexander Hamilton in the churchyard and a parish charter from 1697.
Third time
The parish was chartered by William III in 1697 and this is its third building on the site. The first burned in the great fire of 1776, during the British occupation. The second was pulled down after heavy snow damaged it in 1839. The current one, by Richard Upjohn, was consecrated in 1846, and its 281-foot spire made it the tallest structure in New York for over forty years — it was what sailors saw first coming into the harbour.
The parish was granted a large tract of Manhattan farmland by Queen Anne in 1705, and although most of it was sold or given away over the centuries, what remains has made Trinity one of the wealthiest parishes in the Anglican Communion. It owns a substantial amount of commercial property in Hudson Square.
The churchyard
This is the part most visitors come for now, and it has been busier since Hamilton.
Alexander Hamilton is buried near the south side under a white marble pyramid, with Eliza Hamilton beside him — she outlived him by fifty years and spent them defending his reputation and founding an orphanage. Angelica Schuyler Church, Eliza’s sister, is a few steps away. There are usually flowers, coins and occasionally theatre tickets left on the stones.
Robert Fulton, of the steamboat, is here. So is Albert Gallatin, Treasury Secretary, and a large number of colonial New Yorkers whose brownstone markers have weathered past legibility.
The churchyard is a genuinely quiet green space in a district that has almost none, and the office workers eat lunch in it.
Inside
The interior was reordered and restored in a project completed in 2021, which cleaned the stone, reopened sightlines and moved the altar forward. Some people liked it and some did not. The Astor Reredos behind the altar and the bronze doors, given as a memorial to John Jacob Astor III, both survived.
There is free organ and choral music at lunchtime on a regular schedule, and the choir is professional.
St Paul’s Chapel
Trinity’s other building is four blocks north at Broadway and Fulton, and it is older — 1766, the only pre-Revolutionary church still standing in Manhattan, and the place George Washington prayed after his inauguration. His pew is still there.
It stood directly across from the World Trade Center and survived 11 September 2001 without a broken window. For eight months afterwards it operated as a round-the-clock relief centre for recovery workers, and the exhibition inside about that period is quietly devastating.
Both are free.
More Churches & Cathedrals
St Patrick's Cathedral
A French Gothic cathedral dropped into the middle of Midtown, built when this was farmland and everyone said the location was absurd. Free to walk into.
Cathedral of St John the Divine
The largest cathedral in the world by floor area, begun in 1892 and still unfinished. One tower is missing, the transepts are stumps, and it is extraordinary.