Trinity Church
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Transcript
Trinity Church occupies a site associated with an Anglican parish founded at the end of the seventeenth century. The current Gothic Revival building dates from 1846 and was once a dominant feature of the Manhattan skyline.
Its churchyard contains the grave of Alexander Hamilton, whose career ties this stop directly to the financial district. Hamilton championed federal public credit, a national bank and a commercial economy strong enough to sustain the new government. He also helped found the New-York Manumission Society, though his relationship to slavery and the slaveholding practices of people around him was more complicated than modern heroic shorthand sometimes suggests.
The church itself became a major property owner. Royal land grants and later urban growth gave Trinity enormous real-estate significance as Manhattan developed around it.
That combination — religion, land and finance — is particularly New York. Institutions founded in a colonial port could become exceptionally wealthy simply because the city intensified around their property.
Look at the church against the surrounding towers. In the mid-nineteenth century its spire was among the city’s tallest landmarks. Today skyscrapers dwarf it. The building did not shrink; the economic scale of Lower Manhattan exploded around it.