83. Old St. Patrick's Cathedral Complex

A.K.A.: Old St. Patrick's Cathedral; Old St. Patrick's Convent and Girl's School; St. Michael's Chapel
Location: 260-264 Mulberry Street (cathedral); 32 Prince Street (convent); 266 Mulberry Street (chapel)
Built: 1809-1815, restored 1868 (cathedral); 1826 (convent); 1858-1859 (chapel)
Architects: Joseph F. Mangin (cathedral); unknown (convent); James Renwick Jr. and William Rodrigue (chapel)
National Register Number: 77000964
Listed: August 29, 1977
Visited: October 12 and 21, 2008



The oldest city churches are surrounded by an iron gate, if anything at all. Old St. Patrick's--the St. Patrick's before what's now the St. Patrick's was completed in 1879--is surrounded by a wall.

I find it easy to imagine a New York with horses instead of cars, or candles and gas and not electric light. If you're attentive, the physical evidence of that former life is everywhere, in things like big SoHo windows or skinny streets, the horseplop stink of Central Park South in the summer. A New York with an underdog Catholic minority is a much bigger conceptual leap because--wall excepted--evidence of such things has largely disappeared, and its counter-evidence so imposing. Speaking as a Catholic (born as such, barely raised as such, lived my adult not immune to the religion's power but never fully embracing it either--did I mention I'm gay?) we are, well, everywhere. But it was not always thus.



In spite of brief moments of religious toleration in its colonial days, Roman Catholicism was suppressed in New York following England's Protestant Glorious Revolution. So effective was the clampdown, once source I've found states there were only 100 Catholics after the Revolutionary War, this in a city of 33,000. A new era of governmental tolerance, epitomized by the Bill of Rights, and immigration, primarily from Ireland, changed the equation to the point where New York could sustain a diocese of its own in 1808. Construction on St. Patrick's began a year later, in what was then the hinterlands of Mulberry Street, which was so isolated that a fox was caught in the churchyard five years after it was completed.

Immigrants kept coming and coming and coming to New York City (even before Ireland's Great Famine), and Nativist hostility towards what was seen as the great squirmy masses and their lockstep religion sometimes flamed up into violence. As early as 1806, St. Peter's Church (the St. Peter's before what's now St. Peter's) was attacked by a mob on Christmas Eve; the later St. Mary's Church was burned down to the ground in 1831; and St. Patrick's itself was "menaced" by a mob in 1835.



Which brings us back to the wall. On the official website for Old St. Patrick's, a picture of the wall has a caption implying the wall was erected by the diocese's fourth bishop, The Most Rev. John J. Hughes. Hughes was a power behind the establishment of churches and schools to serve the growing population of Catholics. The thing, though, that makes him beguiling to me is his toughness in a tough time. In the face of rioting that had destroyed Catholic churches and killed people in Philadelphia, he told New York's Nativist mayor-elect John Harper that "if a single Catholic church is burned in New York, the city will become a second Moscow." (He was referencing this.) Don't take this wrong--I say this out of a kind of discomfort and a kind of awe, but not impeity--but it's a wonder he could walk when he had cojones the size of church bells. He signed his letters with a dagger-like cross: he was known as "Dagger John," a name right out of Low Life or Gangs of New York.

When Old St. Patrick's finally burned down in 1866, the cause was one of those absolutely quotidian city accidents--flying embers from a Broadway fire--not an angry mob. The church we see today was built from the walls left standing, the eccentricity of its original Gothic style (which predated the craze for it by about two decades) toned down a bit.



As for the neighborhood's Irish, they were replaced by the Italians (hi there), who much later got systematically bodysnatched by hipsters. Mulberry Street, just south of Old St. Patrick's: all flimsy boutiques.

68. St. Peter's Roman Catholic Church

A.K.A.: Old St. Peter's Church; Church of St. Peter
Location: 22 Barclay Street
Built: 1836-40
Architect: John R. Haggerty and Thomas Thomas
National Register Number: 80002721
Listed: April 23, 1980
Visited: April 13 and May 18, 2008
Additional Documentation: Library of Congress Built in America page



Paint peels off the walls, with pea-soup green giving way to grey. The church is in otherwise fine condition, or at least as fine as a 170-year-old church can be, yet the shabbiness unsettles. I always assume houses of worship to be bedrocks, well-supported by their congregations and the Church they belong to. I don't assume them to be mortal. I mean, I know they are mortal--churches are destroyed and demolished all the time--but mortality seems contrary to their purpose, both religious and social.

What is fragile and delicate inside is granite-stolid outside, and as austere as its Greek counterparts some 5,000 miles and several millenia away. Like St. Paul's Chapel, it was close to terrorist attacks of 2001, and still stands. But I still drop three bucks in one of the donation boxes marked for repairs.

67. St. Paul's Chapel

Location: 209 Broadway
Built: 1764-66 (church); 1794 (tower)
Architect: Attributed to Thomas McBean (church); Crommelin Lawrence (tower)
National Register Number: 66000551
Listed: October 15, 1966
Visited: March 23 and 27, 2008
Additional Documentation: St. Paul's Chapel website



March 23, 2008, 8:00 AM: Thinking Easter Sunday would bring out the crowds, I rush downtown to get a good seat...only to find plenty.

March 27, 2008, 1:00 PM: I rush downtown to get some good pictures on my lunch hour only to find people, plenty of them.

When I knew it, it was a place of lunchtime quiet. The sounds of Broadway bled through the walls and windows but you felt derelict when, while walking through the pews, your shoes squeaked. Sitting down, everyone went their clockwork ways in the streets and sidewalks around the church as if you had fallen into the secret center of the world.

Across the street, the towers were brought down.

Volunteers slept in the pews between shifts at Ground Zero.

St. Paul's Chapel's role as a tourist site, a holy relic of 9/11, now overwhelms its role as an arm of the church, and as a holy relic of George Washington, who worshiped here during the first two years of his presidency, this back when the nation's capital was New York and not yet Washington. The pink and blue Georgian interiors are embroidered with tokens of affection from people all over the world, touched and bewildered by what happened. Early Easter Sunday, the tourists didn't stop by; instead, the church was visited a smattering of locals, plus a few transients who, while polite, were faintly embarrassed by the attentions the clergy gave them. Only a few days later, it is as packed as any church I've ever seen. Tourists walk around from exhibit to exhibit, dazed. In their faces, contemplation and boredom are hard to distinguish.

61. John Street Methodist Church

Location: 44 John Street
Built: 1841
Architect: Attributed to Philip Embury
National Register Number: 73001219
Listed: June 04, 1973
Visited: April 13, 2008



One of the websites related to the United Methodist Chuch calls the John Street church "home of America's oldest continuous congegation." Old, yeah. Like the title character of Virginia Lee Burton's The Little House, this tiny little Lego brick of a building has survived long enough to see the neighborhood rise up and over it; today it's dwarfed by 33 Maiden Lane and Home Insurance Plaza. When I enter the building, I immediately smell the dry and dusty air of construction. You have to figure that's inevitable--167 years old, it likely needs spurts of intense maintenance, spaced a few years apart, to prevent it from falling to the ground. Scaffolds stand above many of the central pews, forcing the congregation to disperse around them, and making it look smaller than it might otherwise.

I feel bad when I visit small churches like this one. At Trinity, I can come in and observe things with a comfortable anonymity, hidden in the crowd, my presence noted by no-one but myself and God. At John Street, I sense that I've been noticed, an unfamiliar face floating through a small, tight-knit community, raising expectations for new blood that I will only dash. I even feel bad for saying that I feel bad about it, because I recognize I may be unfairly assuming they've got a thinner skin than they do. Can't win.

Anyway, the pastor was striking. I didn't bring my notes with me (I'm at my mom's this weekend), so I can't remember what he talked about, but I was liked his mien, the way he bore down on his words: intense, with no hysteria or doom. (He also looked sort of like a young, sincere, and undebauched Christopher Hitchens, if you can believe that--and I think that's rather impressive, if you can believe that.)

42. Trinity Church and Graveyard

Location: 74 Trinity Place
Built: 1839-1846
Architect: Richard Upjohn
National Register Number: 76001252
Listed: December 8, 1976
Visited: September 28 and 29, and December 29, 2008



This is New York City's third Trinity Church. The first burned up in the Great Fire of 1776; the second was demolished in 1839 after a series of severe snow storms (oh, those were the days) weakened the structure. Our current Trinity was the tallest building in New York City until the construction of the New York World Building in 1890 and the subsequent skyscraper arms race, one of whose consequences was the dwarfing of the church. Trinity still has pride of place in the neighborhood, though: as you can see in countless photos of Wall Street, the church stands at its head, staring down the heathen money-grubbers as they make their way down the Stock Exchange and the House of Morgan. It also has pride of place in American architectural history, being the first really famous American example of Gothic Revival architecture. This in spite of the fact that St. John's Episcopal Church in Cleveland predates it some. This is also in spite of the fact that Trinity diverges from certain principles of Gothic architecture: according to Goldstone and Dalrymple's History Preserved, the buttresses and the vaults are merely decorative, whereas according to the 19th century advocates of the style, all parts of a Gothic ecclesiastical building are supposed to have both structural and aesthetic purpose.



Sigh. You know, I've been avoiding this one for months. Part of the problem is that I have no facility in the architectural vocabulary of churches. Nave and narthex, chancel and clerestory--I can't use these words to say sensible things about Trinity. I can't yet understand how these individual parts make a harmonious whole. It's similar to how I have some facility of the way harmony works in Western music, but not enough to talk about classical music without relying on thin variations of "it's pretty" and "I like it." And I'm also not sure Trinity is pretty or that I like it much. It may be a little anorexic (read: tall and thin) for my tastes.



I also can't take good photographs of it, it seems. A good photograph of a building, I've come to realize, is not a trivial matter when writing about it: a good picture can temper my feelings for a building, giving me insights into its possible beauty I couldn't get from living with it, walking past it, passively drinking in its shape day by day. For example, I thought of the Equitable Building as an unlovable lug until I had a chance to savor my pictures of it tipped with sunset orange; 19 Rector Street didn't inspire much thought until I saw its hot colors on a computer screen. With its sandstone brown (black from pollution before its cleaning) and life in the shadows of bigger buildings, Trinity fades into the stony colors of its surroundings, making it harder for me to distinguish its virtues, whatever they may be, in the photograph and in my mind.

18. James Watson House

AKA: Seton Shrine; The Shrine of St. Elizabeth Ann Seton
Location: 7 State Street
Built: 1793-1806; additions, 1965
Architect: John McComb, Jr.
Listed: August 24, 1972
Visited: August 5 and September 1, 2007



A stubborn kernel stuck in the teeth of the city. This survivor from the 18th century lives its life shadowed between two skyscrapers: 17 State Street and a modern building so lacking in distinction that I can't remember what it's called. It sits on prime real estate, but even without the landmark designation they'd never dare tear this one down the way its neighbors have been. 17 State Street may have been erected on a site where (among other things) Herman Melville was born, but the Watson house trumps that several times over because it was once the home of Elizabth Ann Seton, the first native-born American canonized by the Vatican. Our first saint! YEAH! Heck, I'm not even being sarcastic! I genuinely think having homegrown saints are awesome, another sign of America's ability to cultivate civilization. Ra-ra-ra this country! Again: not sarcastic.

It is now a church. One of the so-far unspoken aims of this blog is to not just visit but to experience them as best I can. So I'm going to be visiting a lot of houses of worship in the name of this blog; also, a lot of museums, restaurants, maybe even hotels if I can find I've got some money to blow. We will see. In any event, this is where I attend my first Sunday Mass in decades. When I come in, I take the furthest-back pew in order to be ignored -- though with the beard, I'm sort of unavoidable (I really have to shave it down). Ten minutes to mass, it's still pretty empty, an emptiness heightened by the Spartan elegance of the interior: only a series of modern paintings illustrating the Stations of the Cross interrupts the whiteness of the ground floor.

Eventually a crowd of no more than fifty wanders in. This is nothing compared to most suburban churches I know, never mind city behemoths like St. Patrick's. But you gotta figure that even with its growing residential profile, the Battery Park area isn't populated enough to support anything much larger. Its location also probably explains why the crowd skews so young. With Battery Park's relative lack of stores and amenities within walking distance, this is no country for old men (and women). The older churchgoers here seem to be tourists like myself (let's face it, I am a tourist here), though I could be wrong. Crowd strikes me as largely bachelors and bachelorettes, new mothers and fathers. The latter two try their hardest to calm their children down, and, if time permits, teach them something about the religious life, guiding their kids' hands through the Sign of the Cross. I find this touching partly because I've never been able to learn the Sign of the Cross, much to my embarrassment. Even if I'm not a practicing Catholic and can only mumble my way through most of the things other churchgoers can say out loudly and clearly, I should be able to do cross myself, right?

I end up being impressed by how the mass is conducted. I can only wonder the clergy can do this again and again, week after week, without boring others, without boring themselves.

I leave without a picture. I figure taking a picture in such an untouristed place would be impious and disruptive. (I'll likely not feel such restraint in the larger churches.) I also leave without greeting the priests, because...I'm shy.