St. Paul’s Chapel

New York
NY

St. Paul’s in lower Manhattan

QUICK FACTS
  • St. Paul’s Chapel is part of the Parish of Trinity Church and is the oldest public building in continuous use in New York City.
  • During the Great New York Fire of 1776, it is saved by a bucket brigade that runs from the Hudson River up to the chapel’s roof.
  • Following his inauguration at Federal Hall (30-Apr-1789) President Washington attends Thanksgiving service, presided over by Bishop Provoost, at St. Paul’s. He would continue to attend services there until the second Trinity Church was finished in 1790.
LINKS
LOCATION

View Larger Map

Completed in 1766, St. Paul’s Chapel is the only surviving colonial-era church in Manhattan. The Georgian Classic-Revival structure was used then, and now, as a satellite chapel for the Parish of Trinity Church. The architect is unknown, but as was the practice at the time, the design was taken from architectural pattern-books and the result resembles St. Martin-in-the-Fields in London.

Following Continental Army battles with the British in Fall 1776, a fire swept through lower Manhattan in September destroying some 500 buildings — including Trinity Church. St. Paul’s was saved with a bucket brigade. Throughout the British occupation of New York and after, until 1790, St. Paul’s became the primary church for the parish.

British Generals William Howe and Charles Cornwallis worshiped there. When he became president George Washington walked from Federal Hall, where he was inaugurated, to St. Paul’s to participate in a service with his wife Martha and both houses of Congress. Today, Washington’s pew is designated with the first U.S. Great Seal painted overhead.

In 1960, St. Paul’s was declared a National Historic Landmark for its architecture and its history.

The church and cemetery grounds are open to visitors daily; worship services are held every Sunday.

By modern standards there is something unlikeable about John Hancock. His type of patriotism and charity is as obsolete as his brocaded dressing-gowns and jewelled buttons. He was one of those men who curiously go in and out of style. Once they are out they are hard to value. ‘The golden showers of guineas’ that marked his almost royal progress, his big speeches, like ‘burn Boston and make John Hancock a beggar if the public good requires it,’ do not arouse in us the same genuine enthusiasm they did in his contemporaries. Such men as Paul Revere, [Royal Governor Thomas] Hutchinson, Joseph Warren, or Sam Adams never are in style or out. Their personalities exist quite independently from the accident of their birth in the first half of the eighteenth century. This is not quite true of John Hancock.

Esther Forbes
Paul Revere & The World He Lived In (1942)