Rector Street from Broadway

Rector Street seen from Broadway. Empire Building, completed in 1898, is to the left and Trinity Church is to the right. The elevated tracks in the distance is on Trinity Place, which opened in 1878. Photograph published in 1910 in the book Both Sides of Broadway from Bowling Green to Central Park. Original title: Perspective View of Rector Street.

The Rector Street was laid out after 1739, following a petition of the Trinity vestry to the Common Council to extend its churchyard to the south, using the space of an existing lane (see James Lyne's manuscript plan) and laying out a street further south, which was named Robinson Street, later Auchmuty Street (after Rev. Samuel Auchmuty, third rector of Trinity Church from 1764 to 1777) and then renamed Rector Street by 1788, when the street was regulated by an ordinance and paved. The street was widened by 1800 (see the original width in 1799 in the J. J. Holland's drawing).

The Empire Building was erected on the site of the old Lutheran Church, erected about 1674 and the old English Free School, both destroyed in the Great Fire of 1776. The original temple of the Grace Church was built on the same site from 1806 to 1809, demolished in the 1840s and then replaced by a 5-story commercial building.

The United States Express Building at 101 Greenwich and Rector Street, in the background, was completed in 1906.