Trinity Church Wall Street

A small group of Anglicans in colonial New York petitioned the royal governor for their own parish in 1696, and King William III granted the charter the following year, establishing Trinity Church at the head of Wall Street facing the Hudson River. The parish's fortunes changed in 1705, when Queen Anne and Lord Cornbury granted it a tract of land known as the King's Farm, sixty two acres that, as the city grew around it over two centuries, became some of the most valuable real estate in the world.

The building itself has not survived intact from that founding. The original 1698 church burned in the fire that swept New York during the British occupation in September 1776, and its 1790 replacement stood until heavy snows in the winter of 1838 and 1839 weakened its structure enough that the vestry ordered it demolished. The third and current building, designed by Richard Upjohn in a closely researched Gothic Revival style, was consecrated on Ascension Day, May 21, 1846. Its two hundred eighty one foot steeple made it the tallest structure in New York City for over forty years.

Trinity's colonial land grant proved its most consequential inheritance. The parish divested large portions of the King's Farm over the centuries, including land that became part of Columbia University, while retaining enough Manhattan property that its endowment today ranks among the largest of any religious institution in the country, funding music, education and outreach far beyond an ordinary parish's means.

The church stood directly in the path of the September 11, 2001 attacks, barely a block from the World Trade Center; it survived with only minor damage, and its dependent St. Paul's Chapel became a round the clock relief center for recovery workers afterward.

Trinity's own churchyard, older than the current 1846 building by a century and a half, holds figures whose graves draw more visitors today than the sanctuary above them. Alexander Hamilton, killed in his 1804 duel with Aaron Burr, is buried there beneath a white stone pyramid he shares with his wife Elizabeth Schuyler Hamilton, a monument that has become one of Lower Manhattan's most visited historic sites in its own right, its renewed popularity tied directly to the twenty first century musical that carried his name back into wide public awareness.

Hamilton is not the churchyard's only figure of national consequence. Robert Fulton, the engineer whose steamboat design transformed American commercial transport, is buried nearby, as is Albert Gallatin, the fourth United States Treasury Secretary, and Angelica Schuyler Church, Elizabeth Hamilton's elder sister and a prominent figure in her own right in the transatlantic social and political circles of the early republic, resting close enough to her sister and brother in law that the family's connections in life are legible in the churchyard's layout in death. Across its full combined burial grounds, Trinity's cemeteries hold roughly one hundred twenty thousand people accumulated over more than three centuries of continuous use.

That density of early American history sits directly beneath the same steeple that once stood as the tallest structure in New York City, a churchyard that functions today as much as a walked tour of the early republic's founding generation as it does a working cemetery, its headstones considerably older than the Gothic Revival church that has watched over them since 1846.