Churches: Wall Street Gothic

When New York City last week declared Trinity Church a municipal landmark, it honored something more than an esthetically pleasing place of worship. A grimy, spire-topped Gothic church overshadowed by Wall Street skyscrapers, it is an island of pastoral calm amidst the marketplace. Its outdoor benches are often crowded with secretaries and sightseers, and its cemetery is a favorite lovers’ rendezvous. More than that, though, Trinity Church is a powerful, still-active force in U.S. ecclesiastical history. It is the largest parish in the Protestant Episcopal Church, with 3,900 congregants. It is also the wealthiest, with an endowment exceeding $50 million, title to 20 Manhattan office and industrial buildings, and an annual parish income of nearly $2,500,000.

Wrecks & Whales. Founded by Royal Charter of England’s King William III in 1697, Trinity Church was put on the road to prosperity when an early colonial governor of New York gave its rector title to all wrecks and whales washed ashore on Manhattan. Early communicants included Alexander Hamilton, who is buried in the graveyard, George Washington, and even Pirate William Kidd, whose affiliation is commemorated by a plaque in the luxuriously carpeted vestry room. Later, such wealthy worshipers as John Jacob Astor contributed more marketable assets than whales to Trinity. Today, a vestry that includes New York Stock Exchange President Keith Funston and George A. Murphy, board chairman of the Irving Trust Co., carefully shepherds an investment portfolio that helps pay the salaries of a 150-man staff, including 25 priests.

Sensitive to its reputation as a churchly extension of Wall Street, Trinity has tried to use its fortune with conscientiousness and care. Over the years it has helped establish more than 500 churches and other institutions, including a generous 1754 land grant to King’s College—now Columbia University. Today Trinity supports six church-size chapels in New York City, including three “inner city” missions on the Lower East Side and the fringe of Harlem. In all, Trinity and its daughter chapels sponsor more than 100 sideline activities, ranging from children’s summer camps to chapters of Alcoholics Anonymous; the church provides about one-sixth of the budget of New York’s Episcopal Diocese.

Reformed Catholic. To succeed the late Father John Heuss, who died in March, the Trinity vestry last month named the Very Rev. John V. Butler, Dean of Manhattan’s St. John the Divine Cathedral as their church’s new rector. A self-styled “Catholic in the reformed tradition,” Butler fits into Trinity’s high-church pattern, has a reputation as a pastoral preacher who skillfully uses Biblical passages to illuminate modern themes. Butler would like to see some of Trinity’s daughter chapels become selfsupporting, thus providing seed money for new projects in Harlem and other depressed areas of the city. Trinity’s power and wealth, he says, must always be used “for the maximum good of the nation and the city.”