St. Paul's Chapel: the oldest room and its graves

New York · USA · Church

St. Paul's Chapel on Broadway was consecrated in 1766 and is the oldest surviving church building on Manhattan, one of the few remaining from the British colonial period. George Washington prayed here after his inauguration as president in 1789, and his pew is still there. Around the chapel lies a churchyard with headstones from the eighteenth century. More than two centuries later the room became an unexpected sanctuary: the chapel stands directly beside the World Trade Center, came through the attack of 11 September 2001 without a single broken pane, and for months served as a place of rest and support for the rescue workers at Ground Zero.

Few places in the city carry two such different layers of death so close together: eighteenth-century headstones inside the railings and the memory of 2001 just outside. Visitors describe the chapel as a place where time feels thick, where the silence of the white room stands in sharp contrast to the clamour of the city. Folklore around Lower Manhattan's old burial grounds speaks of faint figures among the stones at dusk, but the real charge here is contemporary and documented: the letters of thanks, the photographs and the mementoes the rescue workers left behind make the chapel a room that holds both old grief and new.

FAQ

Hvor ligger St. Paul's Chapel: the oldest room and its graves?

St. Paul's Chapel: the oldest room and its graves ligger i New York, USA.

Opplysningene bygger på lokal folketro og vitneskildringer.

Image: ajay_suresh · CC BY 2.0 · Wikimedia Commons