Religion: For Favors Received

Sitting in its green square of graveyard among Wall Street’s skyscrapers, old, brown Trinity Church looks like a little missionary in the land of Mammon. Perhaps no other one church in the world has Mammon working for it so well.* Trinity collects a substantial annual income from its $32 million worth of Manhattan real estate.

Trinity got most of its land by grant from King William III in 1697 and from Queen Anne in 1705. As a London model for the New York parish to follow, King William named Wren-designed St. Mary-le-Bow in Cheapside. Trinity’s first bell was a 1704 gift from the Bishop of London.

Last week Trinity took occasion to return, at least in part, a few old British favors. Its rector, church wardens and vestrymen announced that they were sending along a check for $50,000 to be used on the reconstruction of St. Mary-le-Bow—one of the few bomb-blasted churches in the old one-mile-square City of London that can be rebuilt.

* Trinity is just as rich in tradition. Once, so the story goes, when the church needed repair, it borrowed a runner and tackle from a seafaring captain named Kidd; George Washington worshiped there; and Alexander Hamilton and the steamboat’s Robert Fulton are buried in the graveyard.