UNSTEADILY lurching down Prince Street recently in the cold wind, dodging sidewalk obstructions such as tree planters and sidewalk dining areas as well as fellow New Yorkers, I paid homage to Old St. Patrick’s between Mulberry and Mott, one of NYC’s oldest churches. It’s called “old” to differentiate it from its “newer” cousin uptown, St. Patrick’s Cathedral at 5th Avenue and East 50th, designed by James Renwick Jr., opened 1878 and finished in 1888. Old St. Pat’s, NYC’s original Catholic cathedral, is quite a bit older, having started construction in 1809 and completed in 1815, making it one of the oldest buildings in Chinatown/Little Italy. In March 2010 Pope Benedict XVI announced that it would become Manhattan’s first basilica, a church that has been accorded certain specific and ceremonial rites only the Pope can bestow. n 2010, FNY did a post on the church, so if you’re curious, I’ll direct you there.
Though the churchyard and its graves are gated off and inaccessible, I did manage a few shots over the gates. Among the burials are the Venerable Pierre Toussaint and Stephen Jumel, whose uptown mansion in Sugar Hill is Manhattan’s oldest remaining private residence. The catacombs are occasionally open to the public.
“Dagger John” Hughes, the first Archbishop of the Diocese of New York, was originally interred in the Old St. Patrick’s churchyard. Though his remains were moved uptown to the “new” St. Patrick’s at 5th Avenue, he is memorialized here. “He became known as ‘Dagger John,’ both for his following the Catholic practice wherein a bishop precedes his signature with a cross, as well as for his aggressive personality.”
For some interior views of Old St. Patrick’s, see the Newtown Pentacle.
More from Mulberry right here.
3/14/22
5 comments
I helped work on the basilica application, thanks to some connections with a former boss of mine. Old St. Patrick’s burned to its walls just after the Civil War, so nothing in it predates about 1870 or so, save the exterior brickwork and the catacombs. But it’s still a lovely building. And the wall is quite interesting, too. They had to make the place almost a fortress, back in the day.
I think that Venerable Pierre Toussaint’s body was moved to the crypt of “new” Saint Patrick’s in the 1990s. And a portion of Church Avenue, which runs through a heavily Hatian Brooklyn neighborhood, was recently named Pierre Toussaint Boulevard.
Scenes from Scorsese’s “Mean Streets” was filmed on the grounds there. One year recently they showed the film in the catacombs below the church. They used to also have sheep grazing on the property. Beautiful church.
I believe the interior church scenes for the baptism in The Godfather were also filmed in the side chapel of Old Saint Patrick’s Basilica on Mott Street (front entrance on Mulberry), just a few blocks down the road from the Genco Olive Oil building??
My Great Grand Father was a major patron of the church in the early 1900’s. The family name was on plaques all over the church and my mother told me he donated a wooden
carving of the Pieta. I visited 15 years ago and saw the plaques but the carving was not around. Probably sitting in a basement somewhere. Don’t know if the plaques are still
there.