Broadway With St. Paul’s Chapel On A Busy Day c. 1920

St. Paul’s Chapel and Broadway. photo: Keystone-Mast Collection, UCR/California Museum of Photography, University of California at Riverside

If the clock on the tower of St. Paul’s Chapel is accurate, it is a couple of minutes before noon on a weekday. Looking at the pedestrians shadows, the clock is probably correct. Hundreds of people stream by Fulton Street while a trolley is coming down Broadway. One thing you might notice besides the fashion of the day, with many men wearing light-colored straw hats, is that there are few women present. One hundred years ago, the central business area around Wall Street was still the domain of a predominantly male working force.

Here is the same scene taken seconds apart with a tighter focus. The policeman directing traffic can now be clearly seen.

The 30 foot obelisk in St. Paul’s cemetery is a cenotaph to Irish-American attorney and former New York Attorney General in 1812, Thomas Addis Emmet (1764-1827). Emmet is interred at St. Mark’s Church in-the-Bowery.

St. Paul’s is sometimes called a chapel and a sometimes a church. So what designates a chapel? A chapel is a place of worship that has no pastor or priest and no permanent congregation.

Divine Intervention?

According to Trinity Church’s website:

When it first opened in 1766 as an outreach chapel of Trinity Church to better serve its expanding congregation, St. Paul’s was a “chapel-of-ease” for those who did not want to walk a few blocks south along unpaved streets to Trinity. A decade later, the Great Fire of 1776 destroyed the first Trinity Church, but St. Paul’s survived, thanks to a bucket brigade dousing the building with water.

Four other times nearby fires almost destroyed St. Paul’s.

In 1779 a raging fire consuming most of the area did not damage the chapel. The Park Theater on Park Row across from St. Paul’s burned down twice, once in 1820 and again in 1848. Both times the chapel escaped the flames. Directly opposite St. Paul’s on Broadway in 1865, Barnum’s Museum was consumed by a massive fire. A change in wind direction sent flames away from St. Paul’s.

The greatest escape for St. Paul’s destruction occurred during the September 11 terrorist attacks. When the World Trade Center came down it destroyed or damaged many buildings in the area. St. Paul’s Chapel was miraculously spared.