Brick Church on Beekman Street and Park Row

The old Brick Presbyterian Church on Beekman Street, New York City seen from Park Row in the 19th century. Illustration (from an oil painting in the possession of the church) published in 1909, in A History of the Brick Presbyterian Church in the City of New York, by Shepherd Knapp. Below, some text from this book:

«...technically the Brick Church represents, not an offshoot from the original Presbyterian Church of New York, but an integral part of it as it existed until the division in 1809, so that the whole history from 1706, in full detail, might without impropriety be included in the present work, it has seemed proper to take as a beginning the building of the first "Brick Church," and to leave the history of the earlier years to be recorded more fully by some future historian of "The Old First Church," which, at the division, was created out of the congregation worshipping in the older edifice on Wall Street.»

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«On a Sunday morning toward the end of the year 1765, George III. being King of England, and Sir Henry Moore being Governor of His Majesty's Province of New York, the people of the First Presbyterian Church in New York City were assembled as usual in their place of worship on Wall Street, waiting for the service to begin. Their new minister, the Rev. John Rodgers, had now been with them for some weeks, so that the first curiosity regarding him was beginning to subside, and on this occasion no one was expecting that anything of special interest would occur, except that the new minister's sermons were found to be always interesting. But Mr. Rodgers had barely entered the church when attention was riveted upon him, for instead of proceeding to the clerk's desk below the pulpit, and there offering the introductory prayer, reading the Scriptures, and giving out the first Psalm, as had been the custom until this time, the minister was seen to mount to his pulpit at once and begin the service there.»

«Several allusions have already been made to the great changes that had taken place in the neighborhood of the Brick Church. The truth was that during the eighty-odd years from the building of the church to the middle of the nineteenth century, the relation of the site on Beekman Street to the rest of New York had been completely reversed. In 1768 the church was at the extreme north end of the city; almost all the residence quarter lay southward toward the Battery. In 1850, on the other hand, so greatly had New York grown, that the church found itself practically at the extreme south end of the city ; the homes of the people lay almost all to the north of it. The change from residence to business was not yet complete, for hotels and boarding-houses were still to be found in that vicinity in considerable numbers, but the private houses had moved away northward and they had taken the congregation of the Brick Church with them.»