Downtown: My Manhattan

by Pete Hamill

  In London, the British crown also understood that its distant colony needed institutions that would bind it permanently to the mother country. Trinity was selected to become one of those institutions. The grant was surely intended to ensure the dominance of the Church of England, although in far-off London in 1705, this was largely a game of maps and speculation, like handing out land on Mars.

  But that land, the essential secular patrimony of Trinity, was to ensure its survival in the postrevolutionary town where churches came and went, too often reduced to rubble to make way for banks or brokerages. Even their graveyards were paved over by the agents of Mammon. As the city expanded from the hamlet below Wall Street, the land grant became even more valuable (today it would be worth billions). This gave Trinity a sense of security, so that it never succumbed to religious fanaticism in the years when conflict between Protestants and newly arrived Irish and German Catholics sometimes left corpses in the streets. The good vestrymen of Trinity had learned the virtues of patience that came from surviving tumult and disaster. When the church was reduced to ashes in 1776, there was no doubt in the minds of the vestrymen that they would rebuild as soon as the Revolution ended. During that great upheaval, Trinity remained loyal to the British crown. As part of the Church of England, it had no choice. But there was no unanimity in the congregation itself. Some good Anglicans vanished from their rented pews and went off to join the forces of independence. Others remained, certain that the rebels would be crushed and life would return to normal. But nothing is normal about a revolution. In 1783, many of the Tories of Trinity, including the rector, joined the exodus to England and Nova Scotia.

  The ruined church was rebuilt. During the construction, most of the depleted congregation worshipped at St. Paul’s Chapel, a branch of Trinity that had opened in 1766, five blocks to the north on Broadway. When George Washington was inaugurated as president in 1789, he walked from Federal Hall to St. Paul’s, where a pew was decorated in his honor; it can still be seen there. The choice of St. Paul’s that historic day was dictated by one simple fact: The new Trinity was not finished until the following year. But the spare simplicity of St. Paul’s was fitting for a president who represented republican values. It remains the oldest continuously used structure in Manhattan. After September 11, 2001, the chapel served its city with great honor, providing food, drink, and rest to hundreds of rescue workers and hard hats, and its fences were decorated by thousands of spontaneous messages from those who came downtown to find lost relatives, friends, or lovers, or simply to mourn. St. Paul’s has been witness to more history than Trinity itself.

  The 1790 Trinity can be seen in old prints, with its 200-foot spire rising above every other structure in sight. This second Trinity was, alas, an imperfect structure. In 1839, the roof was badly damaged by a heavy snowstorm. The vestrymen and their advisers looked carefully at the problem and decided that it would be more sensible to tear down the entire church and start over than to try to repair it. This time they hired a young architect named Richard Upjohn, who had emigrated from England as a child and was a former cabinetmaker. He got it right.

  If you stand facing Trinity today, the brownstone church of Richard Upjohn soars before you with a kind of muted grandeur. The tower rises 284 feet above the street. This surely must have inserted an unacknowledged model into the New York imagination from the day of its consecration in January 1846. Its presence, decade after decade, surely said that great buildings must challenge the sky.

  The cornerstone was laid in 1841. Over the next five years, Upjohn himself supervised the project, and he was present when it was consecrated. The cost was $90,000, the equivalent of about $1.9 million in today’s money. The material Upjohn used was a brownstone quarried in New Jersey, but one subtly free of the chocolate look of many surviving brownstone buildings in New York. Trinity’s facade is enriched with a subtle rose color that is most luminous in the mornings when the sun courses up Wall Street. If the church is now dwarfed by the skyscrapers that are its neighbors, it still asserts a sense of phoenixlike triumph, rebirth, and enduring faith.

  I wait among the crowds of people entering the church and run my fingers over Trinity’s bronze doors. The day is warm. The doors are cool. The doors are modeled after Ghiberti’s famous, much-imitated doors for the Baptistery in Florence. These doors were added in 1896, designed by Richard Morris Hunt, the favored architect of the uptown nouveau riche who were insisting on chateaux and grand mansions in Newport and on Fifth Avenue. Hunt chose conventional scenes from the Bible and left their execution to the sculptors Karl Bitter, who did the main door, J. Massey Rhind, who did the right, and Charles H. Niehaus, who sculpted the left. Bitter was an immigrant from Austria who also did the sculpture in the Pulitzer Fountain in Grand Army Plaza, facing the Plaza Hotel. On the night of the day he finished the clay model of the Pulitzer bronze, he left the Metropolitan Opera and was run over by a taxi and killed. In New York, artists have learned not to expect applause.

  The doors were paid for by William Waldorf Astor (1848-1919) in honor of his father, John Jacob Astor III, who was known among the Astors as Junior to the day he died in 1890. The original John Jacob Astor, an immigrant from Germany, was not a regular at Trinity, not even conventionally religious, although he was christened as a Lutheran. But he was well-known to the people who ran the church and its properties. Very well known.

  After emigrating to America at age twenty in 1784, Astor had an extraordinary career: peddler of musical instruments, ruthless fur trader, war profiteer, opium trafficker in the China trade. But a deal involving Trinity led him to his truest vocation. This too involved a man whose ghost lingers over the churchyard: Aaron Burr. The story is not a simple one. In 1767, Abraham Mortier, paymaster general of British forces in North America, made a deal with Trinity to lease 465 acres of land along the North River, including parts of today’s Greenwich Village. For Mortier, the terms were perfect: $269 a year for ninety-nine years. It’s a wonderful thing to deal with a church from a position of secular power. On the tract, facing the North River, Mortier built a mansion called Richmond Hill, on land between today’s King, Varick, Charlton, and MacDougal streets. Came the Revolution, Mortier fled New York, and in 1790, Burr acquired the lease. He ran Richmond Hill in a lavish presidential style (although that prize always eluded him), and his guests were as varied as James Madison, Thomas Jefferson, and the man he would eventually send to the earth of the Trinity graveyard, his rival Alexander Hamilton. There is no record of John Jacob Astor attending these festivities, but Burr and Astor knew each other in the small but growing port of New York. In those days, New York was still a walking town.

  In 1802, Burr was serving as vice president under Thomas Jefferson and was desperately short of money. He made a deal with Astor, turning over the Mortier lease for $62,500. The lease ran until May 1, 1866. Astor began subdividing the land into at least 241 lots and devised unique terms for those who subleased the lots from him. They could do what they wanted on their lots for twenty-one years. After that, they must renew the lease or Astor would take back the lot. If they went broke, too bad. Astor cleaned up.

  By then, Astor knew that the city was growing inexorably to the north and, with the Mortier-Burr lease in mind, he began buying land out beyond the city limits. Welded to his vision was the stolid virtue of patience. He built almost nothing himself, other than the Astor Hotel in 1830, an ugly pile just across the street from City Hall Park. Within all of his other properties, he owned the land and let others pay him rent. Every major change in the city’s life helped him: the first use of gaslight on the streets in 1824 (which extended the New York day), the opening of the Erie Canal in 1825 (which doubled the city’s trade and population within a few years), the cholera epidemics downtown during the early 1830s, and then the catastrophic Great Fire of 1835. The filth and congestion of the lower city became intolerable. People began moving north to Greenwich Village and beyond. And the creation of horse-drawn omnibuses in the 1830s made it
possible for some New Yorkers to live to the north and still reach their downtown offices.

  For the first time, New Yorkers began to live and work in different places. Wall Street itself became a predominantly male neighborhood. Private clubs blossomed. A French import called a restaurant began appearing to serve the hungry stockbrokers, accountants, and insurance men. A version of fast food, served at curbside, appeared on the new sidewalks. It came from the bounty of the harbor: oysters, clams, fish, and (from Long Island) corn in many styles of dress, from plain butter and salt to a version of paprika. Most of the fast food was served by African American women.

  By 1834, Astor had given up most of his other businesses to focus on Manhattan property, and he swiftly became the richest private citizen in the United States. He was the country’s first millionaire. And the first multi-millionaire. Late in life, he said, “Could I begin life again, knowing what I now know, and had money to invest, I would buy every foot of land on the island of Manhattan.” Thanks to the desperation of Aaron Burr, he had discovered the true religion of New York: real estate.

  In that sense, John Jacob Astor was a true New York founding father. And the people who ran Trinity Church must have looked upon him with a very human mixture of anger and envy.

  I enter Trinity and slide into an atmosphere of repose, beauty, and refuge. The great high reach of the building, its muted Vermeer-like light, the discreet sound of ancient music: All suggest a suspension of time and space. Here the clock stops, in spite of the New York imperative about time being money. Here the rushing, colliding, driven energy of the Wall Street neighborhood is left behind. The church has an enclosing genius, shaped by the vision of the architect, bringing the visitor in and leaving the world outside.

  There is, in fact, a sense of the medieval about the church, evoking the time before the Reformation and the Counter-Reformation, before the Inquisition and the religious slaughters of Europe. In the Middle Ages in Europe, there was one church, and it was the binding and guiding element of society, more powerful than individuals, merchants, or kings. Or so they believed. That is why, I suppose, to me Trinity has a very Catholic aura, at once simple and lavish. For visitors of any religion, or no religion at all, the interior offers a very special kind of whispered welcome.

  Just inside the doors, where pamphlets and books are stacked in rows against the back wall, there is a guest book for signature by visitors. I sign. The three signatures before mine are from Seattle; Middlesburg, Ohio; and Reynosa, Mexico. About twenty tourists sit together in a pew close to the altar, all obeying the injunction against cell phones. There are hymn books in each perfectly carpentered pew, and velvet cushions that allow strangers to ease into solitude. Signs on the pillars state that the hymns at the next service will be 423, 567, 493. The pulpit on the left of the altar carries a banner marked 1696, the year of the first Trinity. The date on the banner is a reminder that time itself is long, even if the time of man is far too short.

  Stained glass windows add to the Catholic feeling of the immense space and its luminous sense of continuity. The altar, raised high for maximum theatrical command, also features the crucified Jesus and statues of the apostles. We have seen such imagery in hundreds of churches, and that is the implied point: They are the familiar iconography of the Christian faith. They express a world without schism. It doesn’t matter that grander, deeper, or more disturbing versions of the same images exist in many of the churches of Europe, including those in the Vatican. Much of the imagery in Trinity feels like the early Renaissance, before the later triumphs of the baroque. Those windows, paintings, and sculptures are not great art, but the designers in the 1840s were aiming for something other than great art: the expression of enduring faith.

  Here too are carved reclining sculptures of somber old men with heads crowned by mitres, looking very papal. Here are votive candles whose smoke waxes the air. Here is a Virgin Mary carved from wood. Here is worn travertine on the floor. The nonbeliever can gaze in admiration at all of this, and silently applaud the craftsmanship, while feeling free of any urgent demand for belief itself.

  Sometimes I sit alone in the church and imagine myself in other lives. I am sitting with Albert Gallatin, who will leave in a minute or two to visit with his friend John Jacob Astor while sternly resisting his offers of money. The French-speaking Swiss Gallatin is talking with the German immigrant Astor in English, the lingua franca of all New York immigrants. I imagine Burr, in a back pew, counting the house. I try to see the faces of Livingstons and Van Rensselaers and Brevoorts. Over and over, I see George Templeton Strong.

  Strong was one of the greatest of all New Yorkers, which is not to say that he was in any way perfect. He was born in 1820, graduated from Columbia University in 1838, and spent his life as a practicing lawyer. He played and loved music. He became a vestryman of Trinity. During the Civil War, he served on the United States Sanitary Commission, which helped save the lives of thousands of soldiers and civilians. He died in 1875 and is buried in the churchyard.

  But such a sketch does not suggest his enduring value. Starting in his teenage years, Strong kept a diary, one that in the end totaled more than two million words. In its pages (along with the shorter diary kept by Philip Hone) we have at least partial access to much of what we know about nineteenth-century Manhattan. The bulk of the diary remains (disgracefully) unpublished, but after its first publication, in a four-volume abridgment by the historian Allan Nevins in 1952, we instantly understood what a remarkable man Strong was. The writing is lucid, intelligent, brilliantly observant of large-picture politics and the smaller, more revealing details of manners. Strong is the truest voice of the old Protestant elite. He is writing for himself and so expresses his alarm at the flood of immigrants that is changing his New York. He is venomous and bigoted about Catholics in general and the Irish in particular. He is a well-mannered racist, too free to use the word nigger, bleak and guarded about abolishing slavery, uncertain that the American children of African slaves would ever have the intelligence to be citizens equal to whites. In those casual bigotries, he almost surely expresses the beliefs of his time and class. He even sketches a patronizing vision of his wife, fitting her into the mindless stereotype of fairy-tale female innocence. About women in general (who should not even be allowed to practice at the bar as lawyers) he’s a relentless and cranky male chauvinist. He was surely not alone.

  And yet there flows through his work a persistent decency too, a kind of personal rectitude that makes him feel like the central figure in a certain kind of Jamesian novel in which ambiguities and contradictions add to the character’s fundamental humanity. A handsome, melancholy man in public life, Strong allows his private angers to erupt in the pages of his diary, and they all sound absolutely true to the way he sees his city. He is not a politician writing for future judgment. He is not a journalist offering his thoughts to the public prints. He is not expecting applause or condemnation. He is trying to set down what he believes is the truth about his life and times. And sometimes no truth is more powerful than one expressed in anger by a melancholy man.

  Not surprisingly, the work is suffused with that aching nostalgia that so many New Yorkers carry with them. Above all, he laments the fading of Old New York, the city of his youth, and its certainties of style and place. He regrets, with anger, that he had to leave Greenwich Street, where he grew up, and move in 1848 to Gramercy Park, a new development that was the creation of his father-in-law and would become the capital of the Brownstone Republic. Strong’s move to the new neighborhood—roughly between Eighteenth and Twenty-third streets, from Third Avenue to today’s Park Avenue South—was dictated by the decay of the old neighborhood, its decline into commercial use, its rowdy immigrant culture of working-class saloons and boisterous street life, its evaporating privacy, its growing lack of rules. He had become a stranger in his own land. He is, in the best sense, a genuine conservative, but he is also more than that. Once this place was good, says the New York conservative, and
now it is a ruin. Variations on this lament have been voiced by every New York generation since Strong died.

  And yet Strong is never doctrinaire, seldom a narrow voice of orthodoxy. Here is Strong on July 17, 1851, reflecting on the growing poverty of the New York underclass:

  Yet we have our Five Points, our emigrant quarters. Our swarms of seamstresses to whom their utmost toil in monotonous daily drudgery gives only bare subsistence, a life barren of hope and of enjoyment; our hordes of dock thieves, and of children who live in the streets and by them. No one can walk the length of Broadway without meeting some hideous troop of ragged girls, from twelve years old down, brutalized already almost beyond redemption by premature vice, clad in the filthy refuse of the rag-picker’s collections, obscene of speech, the stamp of childhood gone from their faces, hurrying along with harsh laughter and foulness of their lips that some of them have learned by rote, yet too young to understand it; with thief written in their cunning eyes and whore on their depraved faces, though so unnatural, foul, and repulsive in every look and gesture, that that last profession seems utterly beyond their aspirations. On a rainy day such crews may be seen by dozens. They haunt every other crossing and skulk away together, when the sun comes out and the mud is dry again. And such a group I think the most revolting object that the social diseases of a great city can produce. A gang of blackguard boys is lovely by the side of it . . .