St. Paul's was built on land granted by Queen Anne of Great Britain, as a chapel of ease for Trinity Church parishioners who found the mother church inconvenient to reach. Construction began in 1764 and finished in 1766; the octagonal spire, topped with a replica of the Athenian Choragic Monument of Lysicrates, was added between 1794 and 1796. Built of Manhattan mica-schist with brownstone quoins, the chapel follows the Georgian architectural tradition of James Gibbs's St Martin-in-the-Fields in London, though with its classical portico placed unconventionally at the rear. Upon completion, it was the tallest building in New York City -- a distinction hard to fathom today, when the chapel is dwarfed by the skyscrapers of the Financial District. The architect has traditionally been identified as Thomas McBean, a Scottish student of Gibbs, though recent research by historian John Fitzhugh Millar suggests Peter Harrison may have been responsible.

In the years before the American Revolution, the Hearts of Oak militia -- a unit that included King's College students and counted Alexander Hamilton among its officers -- drilled in the chapel yard. When the Great New York City Fire of 1776 burned a quarter of Manhattan after the British captured the city, Trinity Church was destroyed. St. Paul's survived. It would survive the entire British occupation and emerge into the new republic as one of the most symbolically important buildings in the country. On April 30, 1789, George Washington attended services at St. Paul's on his Inauguration Day, and he continued worshipping here during the two years New York served as the national capital. An eighteenth-century oil painting of the Great Seal of the United States, commissioned by the vestry in 1785, still hangs above the spot where Washington's box pew once stood.

The chapel's interior reads like a catalog of early American ambition. Below the east window stands a monument to Brigadier General Richard Montgomery, sculpted by Jean-Jacques Caffieri in 1777, honoring the hero who died at the Battle of Quebec in 1775. Montgomery is buried in the churchyard. A Neo-Baroque sculpture called "Glory," designed by Pierre L'Enfant -- the same man who would lay out Washington, D.C. -- adorns another wall. The pulpit is crowned with a coronet and six feathers, and fourteen original cut-glass chandeliers illuminate the nave. Governors and kings worshipped here: George Clinton, the first governor of New York; Prince William, later William IV of the United Kingdom; Lord Cornwallis; and several U.S. presidents including Grover Cleveland, Benjamin Harrison, and George H. W. Bush. The churchyard holds graves dating back centuries, a pastoral oasis amid the towers of Lower Manhattan.

The rear of St. Paul's Chapel faces Church Street, directly opposite the World Trade Center site. When the towers fell, the sycamore tree that shielded the chapel was shattered; sculptor Steve Tobin later preserved its root in a bronze memorial. Inside, smoke and debris badly damaged the organ, though it has since been refurbished. What happened next was spontaneous and sustained. Volunteers converted the chapel into a round-the-clock relief station. Massage therapists worked on firefighters' shoulders. Podiatrists treated rescue workers' feet. Musicians played to fill the silence between shifts. The iron fence around the churchyard became a memorial wall: flowers, photographs, teddy bears, and handwritten notes accumulated so quickly that Trinity officials erected panels for visitors to add to the tribute. They expected to need fifteen panels. They eventually required four hundred.

St. Paul's Chapel was designated a National Historic Landmark in 1960 and a New York City Landmark in 1966 -- the oldest public building in continuous use in the city. A comprehensive exterior restoration began in 2013, replacing damaged Manhattan schist blocks, refurbishing the steeple clock, and fitting broken window panes with handcrafted glass that replicates the imperfections of the originals. The churchyard was restored by hand to protect fragile grave markers and mature tree roots above human remains. Today the chapel still holds Episcopal services, weekday concerts, and occasional lectures. Memorial banners from September 11 hang in the sanctuary alongside eighteenth-century artifacts. The Thread Project -- colored banners woven by people from around the world -- drapes from the upper gallery over the pews. Two hundred sixty years of worship, fire, revolution, occupation, and catastrophe have not silenced this building. It remains what it has always been: open.