by Fran Leadon
But, like Richard Upjohn, Renwick had studied the treatises and pattern books of Gothic Revivalist Augustus Welby Northmore Pugin, and despite his inexperience, Renwick, no doubt with input from his father, dreamed up an architectural tour de force for what was then still called “upper Broadway.” As construction progressed, the new Grace emerged as both rival and companion to Upjohn’s Trinity Church then under construction at Broadway and Wall Street. By the spring of 1844 both Trinity and Grace were far enough along that one was clearly visible from the other. Exactly two miles apart, they became Broadway’s Gothic bookends.
Grace was built in marble quarried by prisoners at Sing Sing, its delicate traceries, quoins, and bosses carved at Bird Bros., a marble yard conveniently located next door to the construction site. The off-white marble contrasted with Trinity’s dark brownstone down the street and made Grace’s spire glow in the morning sun. The spire, built initially in wood as a cost-saving measure, rose 220 feet from sidewalk to pinnacle, 60 feet shorter than Trinity’s spire but still tall enough to tower over every other building in the area.
The church was cruciform in plan, with the central nave stretching 144 feet east from its front doors on Broadway, the rear façade butting up against the backyard fences of a row of brick houses on the Bowery that had replaced the old Brevoort homestead. Grace’s stained-glass windows were modest compared to Trinity’s, but the interior columns holding up the roof were remarkably thin, which lent a feeling of ethereal weightlessness to the whole enterprise. By the end of 1845 it was clear to most observers that Renwick had built a masterpiece.
“Have you seen the magnificent kaleidoscope at the top of Broadway?” the Tribune marveled as the church neared completion in early 1846. “You don’t mean Grace Church?
“[We] were not prepared to find [Renwick] capable of exhibiting a degree of taste and ability in architecture which puts him at least upon a level with any one who has ever practised that art in the United States,” the Tribune’s editors acknowledged. Commissions poured in, and before Grace was even finished, Renwick was busy designing Calvary Church, at the corner of Fourth Avenue and 21st Street, and the Church of the Puritans on Union Square.
But not everyone was convinced. George Templeton Strong, for one, thought Grace suffered from an “unhappy straining after cheap magnificence,” and he didn’t much care for Renwick, either, whom he found insufferably arrogant. (One evening Renwick ruined a stroll down Broadway by tormenting Strong with pontifications upon Grace’s “points.”) As the accolades for Renwick poured in, Strong could only scrawl vitriolic diary entries about “that most windy of all the bags of conceit & coxcombry that ever dubbed themselves Architect.”
GRACE’S NEW CHURCH became a bastion of wealthy merchants, brokers, lawyers, and physicians. There were other fashionable churches nearby, including, just to the south, the Church of the Messiah at Broadway and Waverly Place, but the showy wealth of Grace’s parishioners was of a different order.
Grace’s flock included social climbers, those merchant princes and industrialists who lacked Dutch roots but had plenty of money; it was the old Dutch families, however, that gave Grace its fashionable luster. Grace’s rotund sexton Isaac H. Brown, a former carpenter with a genius for organization, who kept the church furnace stoked and the parishioners sorted, bowing low to Livingstons, Stuyvesants, Remsens, and Schermerhorns while virtually ignoring the lesser strivers who had bought their way into the parish. (Brown, building on his renown, became Society’s go-to event planner and social gatekeeper, the man to see when a ball, wedding, or funeral needed arranging, and was so well regarded as an arbiter of taste he even endorsed various products, including Mrs. Jervis’s Cold Candy. )
“This is to be the fashionable church,” diarist Philip Hone wrote of Grace as its consecration approached, “and already its aisles are filled . . . with gay parties of ladies in feathers and mousseline-de-laine dresses, and dandies with moustaches and high-heeled boots; the lofty arches resound with astute criticisms upon Gothic architecture from fair ladies who have had the advantage of foreign travel, and scientific remarks upon acoustics from elderly millionaires who do not hear quite as well as formerly.”
In January of 1846, with the church nearing completion, Grace auctioned off its 212 black walnut pews, and old families and social climbers alike grappled to secure the best seats. “The bidding was quite lively and spirited,” the Tribune reported. Two of the “choicest” pews were valued at $950 apiece, and many others went for as much as $400 above their assessed value.
The sturdy pews were private, with little doors opening from the aisles, and to dissuade trespassers the owners’ names were stamped on brass plates firmly bolted to the wood—so firmly that many of the plates are still there today. Intrusions were not permitted, as became apparent at Grace’s consecration, on March 7, 1846. The opening service was supposedly open to the public, or at least to those with tickets, but when one female reporter from the Evening Post twice sat down in private pews, she was twice ejected. The populist Post retaliated by refusing to cover the consecration, while the rival Tribune lost itself in the grandeur of New York’s new cultural epicenter:
The effect of the light through the many-colored windows falling upon the audience and illuminating with pictorial radiance the rich and gorgeous ornaments of the Church, was indescribably fine. Not the least impressive portion of the performances was the music of the choir, which gushed forth in symmetrical undulations, mingling with the harmonies of light so admirably created by the silent artists hid in the stained glass windowpanes, and completing to the satisfied soul a perfectly graceful and expressive picture, formed by music, light, the eloquent silence of architectural symmetry and the spirit of devotion which pervaded the audience.
Margaret Fuller, writing in the same newspaper a few days later, sounded a much different tone, chastising the church for its exclusivity while calling attention to the irony of wealthy Grace borrowing its architectural forms from the cathedrals of the medieval period. “[When] those cathedrals were consecrated it was for the use of all,” Fuller wrote. “Rich and poor knelt together upon their marble pavements, and the imperial altar welcomed the obscurest artisan.”
“This grace our Churches want,” she went on, “the grace which belongs to all religions, but is peculiarly and solemnly enforced upon the followers of Jesus. The poor to whom he came to preach can have no share in the grace of Grace Church.”
CHAPTER 13
UNION
GRACE CHURCH’S WELL-HEELED PARISHIONERS TENDED TO come from the immediate area surrounding the church, having moved with the general northward migration of families from downtown to uptown, where they settled in genteel Federal and Greek- and Gothic-Revival row houses along Washington Square, Bond Street, Gramercy Park, and the newly fashionable Union Square.
The land that became Union Square began not as a park but simply as the “Forks,” the point where Broadway and the Bowery met at an acute angle, surrounded by a few taverns, clapboard dwellings, and open fields. It was the same junction that had, in its creation in 1808, pitted the city against landowners opposed to the extension of Broadway; David Dunham’s house, the one that had protruded into Broadway’s path when the street was cut through, had stood at the center of what would become Union Square.
Union Square appeared for the first time on city maps, as “Union Place,” in 1811. It was a planned feature of the first version of the Commissioners’ Plan issued that year, although it bore no resemblance to the urbane quadrangle it was to become. It wasn’t yet rectangular or even in the same location, originating in an awkward trapezium of leftover land bounded east and west by the Bowery and Broadway, south and north by 10th and 17th streets. It was really an afterthought, the result of the three commissioners, with the assistance of their surveyor John Randel Jr., trying to resolve their rather strange idea that Broadway should straighten away from its bend at 10th Street and head north, crossing over the Bowery before terminating in a propo
sed “Parade,” a 238-acre open space bounded on its southern edge by 23rd Street.
Its name came neither from the “Great Union Meeting” of 1861 nor from the many labor union meetings held there beginning in the 1880s. In 1864, looking back on the work he had done fifty years earlier, Randel remembered that the name came about because the Commissioners had badly mangled the intersection of Broadway and the Bowery, which “left so small an amount of ground for building purposes, that the Commissioners instructed me to lay out the ground, at the union of those streets and roads, for a public square, which, from that circumstance, they named Union Place.”
When landowners around the Forks discovered the commissioners’ proposal that Broadway be straightened and cut through their land, they petitioned the Common Council, and the council, as it so often did, sent the matter upriver to Albany. In 1815 the legislature, siding with landowners, passed an “Act making certain Alterations in the Map or Plan of the City of New York” that not only rejected the idea that Broadway should be straightened and “lost,” as Randel put it, in the Parade, but also erased the first version of Union Place. For the next sixteen years Union Place disappeared from maps of the city, while the route of Broadway, including its bend at 10th Street, remained unchanged.
It wasn’t until 1831 that the idea of Union Place was revived, and it came by way of another legislative act. The same argument used in 1803 to justify the expense of building City Hall—that civic monuments were vital to the city’s image—was repeated as the rationale for Union Place. “It is worthy of remark,” the city’s Board of Assistants reported in November of 1831, “that almost every stranger who visits us, whether from our sister States or from Europe, speaks of the paucity of our Public Squares; and that in proportion to its size, New York contains a smaller number, and those few of comparatively less extent than perhaps any other town of importance.”
The new Union Place was nudged slightly to the north of the original site, squeezed between 14th and 17th streets and, curiously, wasn’t conceived as a public park in the modern sense—as a place for contemplation, relaxation, and physical activity—but simply as a “ventilator,” an open space supplying oxygen to a growing city beset by disastrous epidemics of yellow fever and cholera. That Union Place might also provide ample space for civic “festivities” was a secondary consideration.
At first, Union Place was only “a shapeless and ill-looking place, devoid of symmetry,” and it took the intercession of local lawyer and real-estate developer Samuel B. Ruggles to turn the nondescript acres into a truly public park. After University Place was opened between 8th and 17th streets in 1833, Ruggles petitioned the Common Council to extend Fourth Avenue (present-day Park Avenue) south to meet the Bowery at 14th Street, giving the park crisply orthogonal east and west edges to match those of 14th and 17th streets to the south and north. Before long the park was laid out with gravel walks radiating from a central point, planted with shade trees and flowerbeds, and surrounded by a cast-iron fence.
Ruggles, inspired by the urbane squares of Bloomsbury in London, was an experienced developer. Two years earlier he had laid out Gramercy Park, six blocks to the northeast of Union Square, and was determined to repeat that success at Union Place. In 1839 he moved his family into a neat Greek Revival house at 24 Union Place, one in a row of houses he built facing the east side of the square between 15th and 16th streets, and lived there happily for the rest of his life. (It was in the parlor of No. 24 that George Templeton Strong wooed Ruggles’s daughter Ellen, and upon their marriage in 1848, Ruggles helped the happy couple build a handsome new house on 21st Street, facing Gramercy Park.)
One by one, wealthy downtown merchants and financiers followed Ruggles’s lead, and by the time the new Grace Church was consecrated in 1846, Union Square’s perimeter was an almost unbroken rectangle of mansions. Cornelius van Schaack Roosevelt, an importer of plate glass, lived in a large house at the corner of Broadway and 14th Street, facing the southern edge of the square. (It was from a window on the second floor of that house that six-year-old Theodore Roosevelt, Cornelius’s grandson, watched Abraham Lincoln’s funeral procession pass slowly down Broadway in 1865.) James F. Penniman, a manufacturer of linseed oil, built a fabulously appointed brownstone mansion at 42 East 14th Street, just west of Roosevelt. Henry Parish, an importer of silk, built an opulent mansion, stuffed with Old Master paintings and featuring an oval stair ascending to a central dome, with an attached conservatory in the side yard, at the southwest corner of Broadway and 17th Street. Robert Goelet, heir to a family fortune made in hardware, lived directly across 17th Street from Parish, while, two blocks to the north, Goelet’s brother Peter built a mysterious brick house set back from the street on one-third of an acre of lawn stocked with strutting peacocks. (Peter Goelet’s house wasn’t demolished until 1896.)
“This is now the fashionable quarter,” the editors of the annual New York Gazetteer declared in 1842. But only five years later, Madison Square, six blocks to the north, opened and began luring residents northward once again. Moving had become a consuming passion in New York, an exaggerated version of the restless American desire for constant change.
“That’s the way to live in New York—to move every three or four years,” Arthur Townsend, a geographically ambitious young swain, pontificates in Henry James’s novel Washington Square, in which its protagonist, Catherine, is doomed not only to an unmarried life, but an unmarried life below 14th Street. “Then you always get the last thing. It’s because the city’s growing so quick—you’ve got to keep up with it. It’s going straight up town—that’s where New York’s going.”
On the eve of the Civil War, Union Square was still a residential neighborhood but, because the city had grown so far to the north, was beginning to feel like the center of town.
AROUND MIDNIGHT on April 14, 1861, Walt Whitman was walking down Broadway on his way home to Brooklyn when he heard the shouts of newsboys announcing the surrender of Fort Sumter.
“I bought an extra and cross’d to the Metropolitan hotel (Niblo’s) where the great lamps were still brightly blazing, and, with a crowd of others, who gather’d impromptu, read the news, which was evidently authentic. For the benefit of some who had no papers, one of us read the telegram aloud, while all listen’d silently and attentively. No remark was made by any of the crowd, which had increas’d to thirty or forty, but all stood a minute or two, I remember, before they dispers’d.”
Within the week a recruiting office opened at 613 Broadway, just north of Houston Street, and dozens of volunteer regiments formed. George Templeton Strong arranged for an American flag to be hoisted up the spire of Trinity Church—an unprecedented political gesture on the part of the conservative parish. A huge crowd gathered at Broadway and Wall Street to cheer the raising of Trinity’s flag, as the church’s chimes played “Hail, Columbia” and “Yankee Doodle.”
In those first hectic weeks of war, Broadway became less a street and more like a linear piazza full of milling crowds anxious to hear the latest news bulletins. Broadway’s shops did a suddenly brisk business in patriotic goods. Spier & Company, 187 Broadway, was just one of dozens of shops selling badges, streamers, and “Union cockades.” Up and down Broadway, the daily fashion promenade turned red, white, and blue: “A beautiful bonnet made by Miss A. M. Stuart in Broadway, and on which the red, white, and blue, with silver stars tastefully arranged, constituted the trimming, was worn on Broadway yesterday by a lady, and was much admired,” the Tribune reported. “Thousands of rosettes were sold and worn, and in some instances the gentlemen placed them in their hats.”
Broadway booksellers and publishers rushed out new military treatises and maps. The shelves at Van Nostrand’s, 192 Broadway, included military engineer (and future real-estate developer of Manhattan’s West Side) Egbert L. Viele’s Hand-Book for Active Service (“At the command forward, the soldier will throw the weight of his body on the right leg, without bending the left knee”), Joseph Roberts’s The Hand-Bo
ok of Artillery, and C. M. Wilcox’s Rifles and Rifle Practice. D. Appleton & Company, 443-445 Broadway, sold not only “all the important textbooks for volunteers,” but also, for 25 cents apiece, portraits of Major Robert Anderson, the “Hero of Fort Sumter.” Two blocks to the north, Edward Anthony (501 Broadway), a supplier of photographic equipment, hawked portraits of Anderson alongside images of Abraham Lincoln, William H. Seward, Winfield Scott, and (no doubt to attract the business of the city’s remaining Southern sympathizers) Jefferson Davis for the same price. Music publishers rushed out hastily printed, and apparently hastily written, patriotic songs:
A song for the Stripes and the Stars,
A cheer for the land that bore us;
And away to the camp
With a soldier’s tramp,
And a rousing Union chorus.
Early on the morning of April 19, 1861, the 8th Regiment of the Massachusetts Volunteers, 1,200 strong, arrived in the city by train, marched down Broadway, and bivouacked in style at the St. Nicholas, Astor House, and Lafarge House hotels before mustering in City Hall Park and departing by steamer for Washington. That afternoon thousands of spectators turned out to see the legendary 7th Regiment of the New York State Militia depart the city by way of Broadway, where “a heaving multitude . . . probably the largest crowd that ever thronged that thoroughfare,” waved banners and handkerchiefs. The next day the 6th, 12th, and 71st New York militias marched down the street on their way to the Hudson River docks, where ships waited to take them off to war.