The Churches of New York LV: The “Cradle of Catholicity”

St. Peter
22 Barclay Street

We first encountered this church many years ago – was it in the late 1970’s? In those years the gray mass of St. Peter’s seemed to squat, forlorn and dingy, in the shadow of the surrounding giants: the Woolworth building, the twin towers of the World Trade Center. A parish known only to those working in nearby office buildings who patronized it as a commuter church. So short a memory do Catholics have – how little awareness of their history! For St. Peter’s is the oldest church in New York and in the Archdiocese – indeed, it predates the formation of the diocese of New York by some 20 or more years.

St. Pater’s has a long and colorful history – identical to that of the diocese itself for many years. It was organized in 1784 – the consul general of France was one of the trustees. In 1785, with the decisive organizational and financial support of the minister of the kingdom of Spain, Don Diego de Gardoqui, and of the king of Spain himself, various Catholic gentlemen were able to acquire land and build a church, finished the following year.

“It was the first Catholic church erected and opened after the United States achieved their independence.” 1) There were some 400 in the congregation. The priests of St Peter’s were of all kinds of nationalities and religious orders and included some extraordinary characters. Fr. Malon, SJ, for example, had been a Belgian general (he was buried at St. Peter’s). Sermons were given in three languages: English, French and German.

New York was then the capitol of the United States. In 1789 the first congress held its sessions in New York. In the congregation of St. Peter’s were the Spanish and French minsters (ambassadors) and consuls, as well as Charles Carroll and other Catholic Senators and congressmen.

In 1788 the pastor made a fund raising tour to the then much more magnificent cities of the Spanish empire in America. From Mexico City he brought back five thousand nine hundred and twenty dollars – and a painting of the crucifixion, which he installed as the altarpiece. It was before this image that Elizabeth Ann Seton prayed. It was at St. Peter’s that she as received into the Catholic church in 1805. 2) In 1800 the parish established “St Peter’s free school” – the first parochial school in New York City and one that antedated any public school in the city.

Despite all this seeming success and activity the history of St. Peter’s was from the beginning a stormy one. There were recurring conflicts among the clergy. The yellow fever repeatedly ravaged the neighborhood. In 1806 an anti-Catholic mob threatened – the first instance of what would later be a regular occurrence. In 1813 a priest attached to St Peter’s vindicated the seal of the confessional in court. 3)

The relentless increase in the Catholic population soon made the original structure of St. Peter’s inadequate. The venerable brick church was demolished in 1836 and a new neoclassical structure erected. Finished in 1838, it was at the time one of the grandest churches of any denomination in New York.

Yet one senses some disappointment. Catholic New Yorkers never really warmed up to their grand new house of worship. St. Peter’s was one of the last of the neoclassical temples – and an especially austere example at that!

“The Church was of Grecian architecture, a style which has never since been adopted in our city Catholic churches. It excited no little comment at the time, and the marble tabernacle, a representation of the church itself, and the movable pulpit, appeared to many strange.” 4)

And in a few years Upjohn’s Holy Trinity and Renwick’s Grace church had inaugurated the neo-gothic wave in the city. It was this “Christian style” that became the preferred expression of church architecture in New York. The estrangement from the appearance of St. Peter’s only grew as the 19th century progressed when the temples in this style of architecture became associated with banks.

To say the location is busy is an understatement.

(Above) The wall facing the alley is without a stone facing; (below) the exposed western wall is clad in smooth granite.

In the perpetual shadow of the giants.

Regrettably the old troubles of St. Peter’s quickly returned. The expense of the new building and the unresolved issues of governance under the old trustee regime led to a new crisis in the 1840’s. St. Peter’s faced bankruptcy and was put up for foreclosure. Bishop Hughes’s forceful intervention saved St. Peter’s from this ignominious situation. But it was 1852 before the legal mess could be strengthened out.

After this year, peace finally settled upon this church. St Peter’s became just one of the many flourishing, huge Catholic parishes in the New York of the second half of the 19th century. Yet we must mention one further event:

“In July 1853, St. Peter’s was filled with Catholics and Protestants to attend a solemn requiem for an aged man whose coffined corpse lay before the altar…And never perhaps has the Catholic Church stood forth more grandly in New York than on that day. …(From the eulogy)’There are few left among the clergy superior to him in devotion and zeal for the Church, and for the glory of God; among laymen, none.’ And the man whom the Catholic Church thus honored was a black man, of humble calling, Pierre Tousssaint.” 5)

Yet as early as the 1880’s St Peter’s was among the first parishes to be confronted by a new phenomenon: the rise of purely commercial areas in New York and the resultant disappearance of the local parish population. St Peter’s congregation declined from 20,000 in the 1860’s to fewer than 5,000 in 1914. The parish ceased to be predominantly Irish and embraced a whole number of nationalities. By 1913 the most numerous in fact were the “Polish Ruthenians”; Arab Melkites held their services in that rite in the lower church from 1899 to 1916. 6)

Would the parish itself close? Archdiocesan spokesmen today make much of the fact that some voices in the 1890’s recommended closing some of the downtown parishes. Yet the fact is these parishes were not closed. In the case of St. Peter’s, the question was raised – and answered – as early as 1885:

“One of St. Peter’s most solemn moments occurred in 1885, a hundred years after the founding of the parish, when the second church became eligible for consecration because all debt had been paid.

Some parishioners thought the neighborhood was changing from a residential to a business district and that it would eventually be more profitable to sell St. Peter’s and build a church elsewhere in the city. John Cardinal McCloskey declared that St. Peter’s would “never be alienated,” and instructed the pastor to proceed with his plans for consecration. The solemn ceremony took place on November 22, 1885.” 7)

Probably the original tabernacle that aroused such wonderment in 1838.

So St Peter’s soldiered on as one of the first “commuter churches’” a spiritual oasis in the midst of the increasingly monstrous structures of a monotonous commercial landscape. The school – the first Catholic school in the city – had to close in 1940. By the 1940’s St. Peter’s seemed definitively to have found its final niche: as a chapel for the thousands commuting to and from downtown New York each day. 7)

Yet “the course of human events” changed once again. History returned to St Peter’s. Downtown New York started developing once again as a residential area. St. Peter’s acquired its own residential congregation for the first time in many decades. 8) Recently the entire church interior was completely restored.

And on September 11, 2001 the twin towers of the World Trade Center were destroyed – St. Peter’s was the closest Catholic church to the catastrophe and indeed was nearly buried by it. Wreckage descended upon the roof of St Peter’s which served as staging area for the rescue operations. It was an unimaginable climax to this parish’s history.

Today a visitor encounters a rejuvenated, polished St Peter’s. Some new construction has momentarily freed up some surrounding space, giving the visitor an unimpeded view of the façade of the church for the first time in decades. Contemplating the unadorned, flat, polished surfaces of this church’s exterior, we can readily see how the neoclassical idiom was the first “non-organic” modern style of the West, how St. Peter’s seems to blend in with harsh geometrical shapes of the skyscrapers around it.

Inside, St. Peter’s has a cream color scheme that nicely completes and enriches the monochromatic gray of the exterior. But in 1905 a magnificent set of beaux-art altars was installed. These altars give the interior a much-needed festive touch compared to the somber exterior. Yet above the main altar still presides the altarpiece of the 1789; the same image of the crucifixion before which St. Elizabeth Seton prayed in the infancy of New York Catholicism so many generations ago.

(Above) and (below) Altars of the 1905 restoration – all thanks to a single donor.

The original painting of the Crucifixion.

(St. Peter’s has a fine parish website at: http://www.spcnyc.org)

1) Shea, John Gilmary, The Catholic Churches of New York City at 587-590 ( Lawrence G. Goulding &Co., New York 1878)
2) Shea, op.cit. at 592-593.
3) Shea, op.cit at 595-598, 600-602
4) Shea, op. cit at 610.
5) Shea. op.cit at 614.
6) The Catholic Church in the United States of America, Vol. 3 at 368 (Catholic Editing Company, New York 191
7) http://www.spcnyc.org/index.cfm?load=page&page=172
8) http://www.spcnyc.org/index.cfm?load=page&page=172