A History of New York in 27 Buildings

by Sam Roberts

  Stuyvesant was particularly averse to Quakers. To be fair, at the time, they were not the latter-day mild-mannered pacifists we’re more familiar with, but rabble-rousing proselytizers who were viewed as interlopers disruptive of Dutch traditions. In 1656, the director-general and his New Netherland Council banned all public and private religious services by any group “except the usual and authorized ones, where God’s Word” was preached and taught according to the established custom of the Reformed Church. In 1657, Stuyvesant had no qualms about ordering the public whipping and jailing of Robert Hodgson, a twenty-three-year-old Quaker preacher, and then banning New Amsterdamers from harboring any other Quakers in the colony.

  The loudest outcry came from the mostly British newcomers to Flushing, a village whose name was an Anglicized variation of Vlissingen, the home port in Holland of the Dutch West India Company, which had chartered the settlement on Flushing Creek. The British signed a petition to Stuyvesant, a remonstrance (an objection or protest), that was not only pioneering politically, but was also earth-shattering theologically. “We desire therefore in this case not to judge lest we be judged, neither to condemn lest we be condemned, but rather let every man stand or fall to his own Master,” the petition stated. “Therefore, if any of these said persons come in love unto us, we cannot in conscience lay violent hands upon them, but give them free egress and regress unto our Town, and houses, as God shall persuade our consciences, for we are bound by the law of God and man to do good unto all men and evil to no man.” Invoking the fundamental law of the Dutch States General, the petitioners specifically encompassed “Jews, Turks, and Egyptians, as they are considered sons of Adam,” and said they shall also “be glad to see anything of God” in Presbyterians, Independents, Baptists, and Quakers (Roman Catholics were pointedly excluded, however).

  The remonstrance’s ecumenical embrace was not only conspicuously inclusive, but advanced an innovative principle of Dutch broadmindedness as viewed through an English Protestant prism: that religious persecution was in itself a sacrilege. As Wei Zhu wrote in 2014 for the Social Science Research Council’s website the Immanent Frame, the notion that God would be angered by intolerance was novel. The prevailing orthodoxy had been precisely the opposite: that doubt, heresy, and diversity would bring on divine retribution. This new interpretation suggested that an official religion was theologically unjustified and provided an ecclesiastical foundation to separation of church and state. That the petitioners were not Quakers (though some would later convert) was also significant. While most were English, they were bound by Dutch rules under their charter from the West India Company, yet they were risking their liberty for their new neighbors, not for themselves.

  Stuyvesant, predictably, was unmoved by the appeal. In fact, quite the contrary. He was moved to punish the petitioners themselves. He arrested the sheriff and town clerk who handed him the document, jailed the two magistrates who had signed it, fined all the signers, and demanded that they recant. He ordered all the colony’s magistrates to learn Dutch and imposed a tax on the residents of New Amsterdam to subsidize the salary and expenses of a Dutch Reform minister. He even proclaimed a Day of Prayer to repent from religious tolerance. But it was too late.

  Meanwhile, John Bowne had emigrated from Derbyshire, England, in 1649 with his father and sister. He moved from Boston to Flushing in 1656, the same year that he married Hannah Feake and that the remonstrance was signed. First Hannah, then John, was curious about the Quakers, who were then meeting surreptitiously in the nearby woods to worship. In 1661, John invited them to convene in his new home, and, swayed by his wife, became a Quaker himself. By August 1662, a formal complaint had been filed against him with the New Netherland council by a local magistrate from what later became Jamaica, Queens, on the grounds that it was “forbidden to bring the strolling people called Quakers into the province without obtaining the consent of the government.”

  Bowne was arrested and fined. After refusing for three months to pay, he was paroled for three days to bid his wife and friends goodbye, escorted to a ship bound for Holland, and banished in perpetuity from New Amsterdam. Realizing, perhaps, they were on shaky ground legally and concerned about being second-guessed, a few weeks later, members of the council preemptively delivered a vigorous defense of their heavy-handedness to the West India Company directors in the Netherlands. They elaborated by explaining that the punishment they inflicted was in response to complaints about the Quakers’ “insufferable obstinacy” and unwillingness to obey orders, and that Bowne had been banished as a deterrent. If the Quakers continued to violate the law, the council would, it wrote, “against our inclinations, be compelled to prosecute such persons in a more severe manner, in which we previously solicit to be favored” with the “wise and foreseeing judgment” of the West India Company’s directors.

  Banishing Bowne proved to be a mistake. When he arrived in Amsterdam to defend himself in person, he apparently was more persuasive than Stuyvesant and his council had been in their obsequious rationale and request for carte blanche for future dealings with other “insufferable” Quakers. The West India Company, in issuing its own remonstrance, made no pretense of righteousness. Its response, in keeping with New Amsterdam’s original mission and a for-profit board’s agenda, was resoundingly practical. In the convoluted language of diplomacy, which was unambiguous to their fellow functionaries on the council, the directors didn’t defend Quakers, but wrote:

  Although it is our cordial desire that similar and other sectarians might not be found there, yet as the contrary seems to be the fact, we doubt very much if vigorous proceedings ought not to be discontinued, except you intend to check and destroy your population, which, however, in the youth of your existence, ought rather to be encouraged by all means; wherefore it is our opinion that connivance would be useful, that the conscience of men, at least, ought to remain free and unshackled. Let every one be unmolested as long as he is modest, as long as he does not disturb others or oppose the Governments.

  In other words, for New Amsterdam to expand beyond its population of nine thousand or so and to prosper, the council had to suffer the influx of diverse, uninvited, and even objectionable refugees. Almost apologetically, the West India Company directors added: “This maxim of moderation has always been the guide of the magistrates of this city, and the consequence has been that, from every land, people have flocked to this asylum.” In plain English, what the directors were saying was, forget about the ordinance that the council passed in the interim to prevent the immigration of “vagabonds, Quakers, and other Fugitives.” Just look the other way and get on with the business of making money.

  On January 30, 1664, fifteen months after he was exiled, John Bowne returned to New Amsterdam. Two months later, during a temporary truce in its on-again, off-again war with Holland, England’s King Charles II unilaterally awarded the land occupied by the colony to his brother, the Duke of York. The two European countries remained fierce commercial rivals, even during their battlefield sabbaticals. While the Dutch vastly outnumbered the English in the New World, by the time four English warships sailed into New Amsterdam’s harbor that September, Stuyvesant was so despised because of his autocratic intolerance that few of his constituents responded to his rallying cry to defend the city. New Amsterdam surrendered on September 8, 1664, without a fight. In the generous Articles of Capitulation that Stuyvesant begrudgingly agreed to, the British guaranteed the Dutch colonists not only the right to retain their weapons and their taverns, but also “the liberty of their consciences in Divine Worship and church discipline.”

  In 1694, nearly four decades after the Quakers began their weekly meetings in John Bowne’s house at what is now 37-01 Bowne Street, they erected a modest, two-story meetinghouse of their own. It still stands on Northern Boulevard in Flushing. Bowne died a year later, having “suffered much for truth’s sake,” as the minutes from that week’s Quaker meeting reported. Following on the Flushing Remonstrance, which both reinforced the r
ule of law and the right of ordinary citizens to petition, Bowne laid the foundation for religious freedom that Congress would codify in the Constitution nearly a century later at Federal Hall in Manhattan. He also left an enduring family legacy (Robert Bowne founded the financial printer that bears the family surname, the nation’s oldest public company; Walter and Samuel Bowne became a nineteenth-century mayor and congressman, respectively). Bowne descendants were still living in the Queens house as recently as 1945, when it was dedicated as a national shrine. The house was expanded several times in the seventeenth century from the original 1661 kitchen and upstairs bedrooms, and in 1830 the roof was raised and replaced with the steeper version that survives today. The Bowne House is now owned and maintained by the City of New York.

  While John Bowne’s name has been largely forgotten, his legacy is flourishing in Flushing itself, an incredibly diverse neighborhood where about six in ten residents were born abroad and fewer than one in four residents speaks only English at home. And while the neighborhood comprises a mere 2.5 square miles, Flushing embraces some two hundred houses of worship, including a mosque and synagogues (including one just for Jews from Georgia, in the former Soviet Union); Episcopal, Greek Orthodox, Baptist, Dutch Reformed, and Roman Catholic churches; and a Hindu temple on Bowne Street (one of the first in the United States) whose logo combines a Christian cross, a Star of David, and an Islamic crescent and star in what its founder, a former United Nations official, described as “the totality and fundamental unity at the core of all religion.”

  The temple is a direct outgrowth of the legacy of the Flushing Remonstrance and of John Bowne. “Religious tolerance did not begin with the Bill of Rights or with Jefferson’s Virginia Statute of Religious Freedom in 1786,” Professor Kenneth T. Jackson of Columbia, the editor of The Encyclopedia of New York City, says. “With due respect to Roger Williams and his early experiment with ‘liberty of conscience’ in Rhode Island, this republic really owes its enduring strength to a fragile, scorched, and little-known document that was signed by some thirty ordinary citizens on December 27, 1657.”

  By itself, the Bowne House today doesn’t look very different from when John Bowne built it. (George Samoladas)

  2

  ST. PAUL’S CHAPEL

  St. Paul’s Chapel on Broadway at the turn of the twentieth century. (New York Times, 1907)

  Washington never slept there, but, figuratively, he did genuflect there. When the wardens of Trinity Church decided to build a so-called chapel of ease to accommodate distant parishioners in the early 1760s, the site of their proposed St. Paul’s Chapel was a field of golden wheat on the northern outskirts of the city.

  Today, Trinity and St. Paul’s are five blocks apart. In the eighteenth century, though, when Hanover Square was the center of population, parishioners living anywhere north of what is now Fulton Street faced a minimum quarter-mile trek on rutted, rudimentary roads to attend services on Wall Street. St. Paul’s seemed so isolated at the time that Robert Morris, one of the nation’s founders, recalled “walking the country” from Queen Street (now Pearl Street), near the East River, uptown to visit the new chapel. Fully grown chestnut and elm trees shaded nearby orchards (the felling of one inspired George P. Morris to write, “Woodman, Spare That Tree!”), and during one service a stray horse languidly made its way up the chapel’s aisle.

  Trinity was founded in 1696, and St. George’s, its first chapel of ease, as it was called for the convenience it offered, was built in 1752 on what became Beekman Street to accommodate congregants from the East Side. (St. George’s separated from Trinity in 1811; three years later, it burned, it was rebuilt, then the congregation joined its wealthier brethren at a new church on Stuyvesant Square. Today, it’s the site of the Southbridge Towers apartment complex.) The wardens laid the foundation stone for St. Paul’s on May 14, 1764, between Fulton (then Partition) and Vesey Streets. It was the most prominent structure built with its back to what was then known as the Broadway. The alignment of St. Paul’s was not intended as a snub. Rather, the view west was so much better. The grounds sloped down to the Hudson River, which, before Manhattan’s shoreline bulged with landfill, at high tide all but lapped at Greenwich Street, less than two blocks away. The porch provided a breathtaking view of the harbor and the New Jersey Palisades beyond. (A portico was later added on the east side to accommodate carriages pulling up on Broadway.)

  Built of Manhattan mica-schist quarried locally, roughly dressed, and cut into blocks barely larger than cobblestones, St. Paul’s was designed by Thomas McBean, a Scottish émigré and student of James Gibbs, the architect of London’s Church of St. Martin-in-the-Fields in Trafalgar Square. In accordance with the eighteenth-century Anglican bigotry against all things Catholic, Gibbs (a Catholic himself) eliminated saints and other religious symbols on St. Martin’s Georgian exterior. Similarly, the interior of St. Paul’s reflected the emphasis of eighteenth-century Anglican services on the sermon instead of the mass, configuring the pews and gallery to focus the congregation less on the “Lord’s Table” or “Holy Table” (the altar in Catholic churches) than on the pulpit and the preacher. The New York Journal pronounced the chapel “one of the most elegant edifices on the continent.”

  In the nave, the fluted, twenty-four-inch-diameter octagonal pine columns that support the roof are actually forty-four-foot-tall tree trunks set on a stone base. The altar’s Palladian window features the Neo-Baroque wooden cartouche titled Glory, designed by Peter L’Enfant (he identified himself as Peter, not Pierre, while he lived in America), which, festooned with two tablets, the Hebrew word for God, and Mount Sinai illuminated by lightening, symbolize the gift of the Ten Commandments to the Israelites. The allegorical sculpture was not integral to the original decor (celebrating the chapel’s centennial, the rector Morgan Dix described it as “perhaps as inappropriate as anything that could have been invented”). The sculpture’s artistic merit was relative; it was installed at that location largely for utilitarian reasons: to conceal the shadow cast on the window by the back of a marble memorial honoring General Richard Montgomery, a Revolutionary War hero later buried beneath the chapel’s east porch. Authorized by the Continental Congress in 1776, the Montgomery monument is believed to have been the first commissioned by the new U.S. government.

  The first service was held on October 30, 1766, and Rev. Samuel Auchmuty, Trinity’s rector, like the Glory altarpiece, invoked Exodus. “And He said,” Auchmuty quoted the Old Testament, “draw not nigh hither, put off thy shoes from off thy feet, for the place whereon thou standest is holy ground.” Not everyone heeded his sermon. In late-eighteenth-century New York, even holy ground was no safeguard against have-nots who engaged in illegality, nor did the state have any qualms about prosecuting crimes against the church. One man who stole satin from the cushions at St. Paul’s was sentenced to death, though he was eventually pardoned by the royal governor. Capital punishment was imposed on another New Yorker for stealing books from the chapel, but once it was determined that he could read and write—suggesting that he had been schooled by the clergy—his sentence was reduced to being “burnt in the hand.”

  The first Trinity (which was on Wall Street and also faced the river) burned down in 1776, shortly after the British seized the city, in a windswept blaze that devastated most of downtown. The fire was considered suspicious. Without firm proof, it was largely blamed on fleeing patriots seeking to deny the occupying troops comfortable winter quarters. All that remained of Trinity was a charred hulk, which wasn’t replaced until 1790, fully seven years after the British had finally evacuated the city (this second incarnation of the church lasted only a half century because its flimsy roof was weakened by heavy snowfalls). St. Paul’s was saved after a bucket brigade was assembled that stretched from the Hudson to the chapel’s roof. Services resumed the night after the fire (and one week after the British had landed, to the relief of local loyalists). The sermon offered there by Admiral Lord Howe’s chaplain might have been a concili
atory gesture to a fractured and still smoldering city whose population had been nearly halved in advance of the invasion. “This has never been, and I am confident never will be,” he said, “the pulpit of contention and strife.” (Nearly a century later, Trinity’s rector Morgan Dix would say, “These were remarkable words, especially when it is considered that they were spoken by a military chaplain to a people intensely excited by alarm and passion.”) While Trinity stood in ruins, St. Paul’s literally and figuratively remained a sanctuary during the Revolutionary War, its own valuable manuscripts and rare books from King’s College placed for safekeeping in a room in the chapel’s library, which was walled up.

  After the war, St. Paul’s and the other Anglican churches in the former colonies legally severed their ties to the Church of England (though remained in the worldwide Anglican Communion) and became Episcopalian. On April 30, 1789, after Washington was inaugurated at Federal Hall, he and his entourage walked the few blocks to St. Paul’s for a divine blessing, both for the new nation and, presumably, for what would be his prototypical presidency. He attended services on most subsequent Sundays while the nation’s seat of government was in New York. (In his diary for July 5, 1790, he wrote: “About one o’clock a sensible oration was delivered at St. Paul’s Chapel by Mr. Brockholst Livingston on the occasion of the day.”) Over the president’s pew is a painting of the Great Seal of the United States (although the bird has more often been likened to a turkey than to an eagle). Atop the pulpit is what has been described as the only symbol of royal rule remaining in place in New York, six feathers, which may, or may not, represent the heraldic badge of the Prince of Wales (which has only three). The Waterford chandeliers that still hang above the nave and galleries were ordered in 1802. A generation later, the chapel was still commemorating the American Revolution with some of the surviving original cast: it was the setting for a grand concert of sacred music in 1824, when the Marquis de Lafayette was boisterously welcomed back to New York.