Trinity Church: Responding to a big city’s changing needs

Trinity Church /
New York City

One of the great joys during my recent visit to New York City was the opportunity to worship at historic Trinity Church, located near the Financial District, where Broadway intersects Wall Street.

Trinity Church was founded in 1697 as the first Anglican, or Church of England, parish in the colony of New York. Imagine, at the time, the entire city of New York lay south of the church – south of Wall Street!

The first church building opened on its current site in 1698.

Back during the Revolutionary War years of 1775 to 1783, Trinity parish soon expanded. It included two “chapels-of-ease”: St. Paul’s and St. George’s, which allowed it to serve a growing Anglican congregation. However, during this period, the Great Fire of 1776 destroyed the first Trinity Church building. St. Paul’s Chapel was used for worship until the second church building was built and opened in 1790.

I learned how among our country’s founding fathers – and mothers – that George Washington, our first President of the United States, worshipped in Trinity parish during the time when New York City was our nation’s capital (before it moved to Philadelphia and, subsequently, to Washington, D.C.). The first Justice of the Supreme Court, John Jay, was also a Trinity parish member as were the first Secretary of the Treasury, Alexander Hamilton, and his wife, Eliza Schuyler Hamilton, who was a philanthropist and orphanage co-founder. Both Alexander Hamilton and Eliza Schuyler Hamilton are buried in the churchyard at Trinity Church.

Alexander Hamilton and his wife,
Eliza Schuyler Hamilton, are buried
in the Trinity Church churchyard.

When structural damage to the second Trinity Church, caused by a heavy snowfall in 1838, occurred, the architect Richard Upjohn was hired to design a new church building, which still stands today. The third – and current – Trinity Church was consecrated in 1846.

By the late 19th century, thanks to immigration and industrialization, which transformed New York City, Trinity Church saw an expansion of its ministries. It began to operate a mission house, a day school, a night school, an industrial school, a cooking school and a ladies’ employment society. It also added worship services catering to business people.

As New York City continued to grow and expand to the north, Trinity parish included 11 chapels located in neighborhoods around the city, including the Church of the Intercession, located on 155th Street, and St Cornelius on Governors Island.

Inside Chapel of All Saints /
Trinity Church

As the 20th century arrived, the Chapel of All Saints was added to Trinity Church in 1913. It was designed by architect Thomas Nash in a fourteenth century English Gothic style. I learned that Nash used the buttresses of Trinity Church as “the piers” for the south side of the chapel. Eight representative saints from church history support the chapel ceiling: St. Peter and St. Paul, St. Ignacio’s and St. Clement, St. Augustine and St. Athanasius, and St. Patrick and St. Aidan.

During the 20th century, Trinity Church continued its mission of responding to the city’s changing needs. It began offering music ministries that were innovative, it supported homeless services, and it went about building a diverse congregation that was color blind. Most chapels became independent parishes by the 1970s.

Which brings us to Trinity Church today in the 21st century. As Trinity Church undergoes a two-year renovation, it continues a tradition of supporting its neighborhood through its work on social justice initiatives, conducting workshops and offering daily worship services. It remains a growing and vibrant Episcopal community that “seeks to serve and heal the world by building neighborhoods that live Gospel truths, generations of faithful leaders, and sustainable communities.”

With daily and Sunday morning worship at Chapel of All Saints as well as daily and Sunday worship services at St. Paul’s Chapel (on Broadway at Fulton Street), both offer sanctuaries of quiet and churchyards full of historic memorials and monuments.

Photos: Trinity Church exterior, courtesy of church website. Alexander Hamilton tombstone and Chapel of All Saints interior, by Michael Dickens © 2019.

Encore: Who lives, who dies, who gets to tell your story?

Creative genius / Lin-Manuel Miranda

It's been said that works of art have long informed how people understand the past, and Lin-Manuel Miranda's Hamilton, which I saw for the second time in the past year last weekend in New York City, is no exception.

As the creative genius of the Broadway smash-hit Hamilton, Miranda changed the way that people considered one of the Founding Fathers and the era he lived in. In doing so, it put Miranda in lofty territory, alongside how Shakespeare transformed Richard III, and how the author Leon Uris romanticized the founding of Israel in his novel Exodus.

In revisiting an essay I wrote about Miranda in March 2016, here's some things worth noting:

In creating Hamilton, Miranda relied on the core elements of hip-hop and R & B-inspired music as well as jazz, pop and Tin Pan Alley – plus a racially-diverse cast – to make history as relatable as possible. Soon after its 2015 debut, Hamilton became a certifiable Broadway box office hit – it remains one of the toughest, most-sought after tickets on Broadway – and the musical became centered around a story arc that relates Hamilton's life story, from his orphaned upbringing in the West Indies to his death in a duel at the hands of Aaron Burr.

"This is a story about America then, told by America now," Miranda, a native New Yorker of Puerto Rican heritage, once told The Atlantic, "and we want to eliminate any distance between a contemporary audience and this story."

In a September 29, 2015 essay for The Atlantic, Edward Delman wrote, "Hamilton, then, has the potential to strongly influence the way Americans think about the early republic. For one thing ... it understands Thomas Jefferson to be a deeply flawed individual. It presents an American history in which women and people of color share the spotlight with the founding fathers. The primarily black and Hispanic cast reminds audiences that American history is not just the history of white people, and frequent allusions to slavery serve as constant reminders that just as the revolutionaries were fighting for their freedom, slaves were held in bondage.

"Perhaps, the most significant lesson the show might teach audiences, and one that has particular relevance today, is the outsized role immigrants have played in the nation's history. Alexander Hamilton was an immigrant – a fact that Miranda repeatedly emphasizes throughout the show – and the musical also prominently features the Marquis de Lafayette, a French nobleman who played a crucial role during the revolutionary war."

It's pretty amazing to think back to the fascinating process which Miranda translated the history of the unlikely rise and untimely fall of the first U.S. Treasury Secretary, Alexander Hamilton, onto the stage. He drew upon the Ron Chernow biography of Hamilton for focus and inspiration. Then, flash back to May 12, 2009, when Miranda first performed "The Hamilton Mixtape" before an audience that included President Barack Obama and First Lady Michelle Obama at the White House Evening of Poetry, Music and the Spoken Word, accompanied by pianist Alex Lacamoire.

In looking back at a February 2015 feature about Hamilton, Rebecca Meade of The New Yorker wrote: "It does not seem accidental that Hamilton was created during the tenure of the first African-American President. The musical presents the birth of the nation in an unfamiliar but necessary light: not solely as the world of élite white men but as the foundational story of all Americans. Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, and George Washington are all played by African-Americans. Miranda also gives prominent roles to women, including Hamilton's wife Eliza Schuyler, and sister-in-law Angelica Schuyler. When they are joined by a third sister, their zigzagging harmonies sound rather like those of Destiny's Child.

"Miranda portrays the Founding Fathers not as exalted statesmen but as orphaned sons, reckless revolutionaries, and sometimes petty rivals, living at a moment of extreme volatility, opportunity, and risk. The achievements and the dangers of America's current moment – under the Presidency of a fatherless son of an immigrant, born in the country's island margins – are never far from view."

The Grammy Award-winning original cast recording, produced by The Roots' Questlove and Black Thought – has been a welcome companion of mine on my car stereo for several years – and I never really tire of its songs.

"I don't know how many really good ideas you get in a lifetime," Miranda once told The Hollywood Reporter, "but the idea of telling Hamilton as a hip-hop story was definitely one because you get to do everything: love and death and a war and duels and revenge and affairs and sex scandals."

One thing remains certain: Thanks to Miranda's genius, the Tony Award-winning Hamilton continues to have a positive influence in altering our perception of American history, and the role in which artists are helping shape historical narrative. And, Miranda knows that he can't stop being who he is just because more people are looking at him.

Photo credits: Lin-Manuel Miranda's Twitter feed and Google Images. Video/audio credit: YouTube.com.

At the year's end, one last 2017 travel adventure

St. Patrick's Cathedral along Fifth Avenue.

It was Alan Alda, one of my country's most beloved and respected actors, whom many of us remember as Hawkeye Pierce in the long-running American TV series "M*A*S*H," who once gave a bit of wise advice that's resonated with me. As we awake to the final week of 2017, no matter where we may be or reside in the world, it's worth a moment of our time to think about what he said.

"You have to leave the city of your comfort and go into the wilderness of your intuition. What you'll discover will be wonderful. What you'll discover is yourself," said Alda.

Now that my wife and I live on the East coast, we enjoy escaping to New York City. It's only 3 1/2 hours by train – and Amtrak has several Northeast Regional trains that travel between Washington D.C.'s Union Station and New York City's Penn Station daily.

Since moving to the Beltway, we've traveled to New York City by train twice, most recently last weekend. Each time, there are new discoveries that await us and it provides us with a chance to rediscover old things from a different perspective.

The Radio City Music Hall Christmas Spectacular.

Whereas, our previous trip over Labor Day weekend was very much an Upper West Side experience, last weekend we found ourselves in the thick of the Christmas holiday revelry as we lodged a block off Times Square at the Hotel Muse on West 46th Street, between Sixth and Seventh Avenues. We were a short walk from Rockefeller Center and Radio City Music Hall, where we caught a glimpse – along with thousands of other tourists – of the tall and majestic Rockefeller Center Christmas tree and ice skating rink. Also, we saw the nearby festive holiday windows of Saks Fifth Avenue, the Neo-Gothic magnificence St. Patrick's Roman Catholic Cathedral, and took in a late Friday evening performance of the Radio City Christmas Spectacular at Radio City Music Hall. The headlining Rockettes are truly a one-of-a-kind New York experience and Radio City Music Hall is an art deco masterpiece that has been truly well-preserved and taken care of over the years.

Grand Central Terminal in New York City.

On Saturday, we rode the subway to Herald Square – to the land of "Believe" – and shopped at Macy's flagship New York City store.

Then, we ventured to Grand Central Terminal to shop at a lovely boutique holiday fair and to also enjoy warm soup on what turned out to be a wet and cold wintry day.

Later, our evening included dining and listening to seasonal holiday music at Jazz at Lincoln Center – and it was most welcome and enjoyable.

We'll be back in 2018 to see Hamilton.

New York City is a place that never sleeps and I could never see myself getting bored. There's always plenty to see and do and admire and be curious about. I know we'll be back next year as we have tickets to see Hamilton.

I look forward to 2018 and the New Year that awaits. Hopefully, it will be a year full of new discoveries and travel adventures. I hope yours will be filled with new discoveries, too.

Safe travels and Happy New Year!