Trinity Church and St. Paul's Chapel: How to Visit Both in a Morning
By 17John Hotel ·
Quick answer
You can see both Trinity Church and St. Paul's Chapel in about an hour and a half, on foot, for free. St. Paul's Chapel sits on Broadway between Fulton and Vesey, across from the World Trade Center site, and the chapel and its churchyard are open to the public 8:30am to 6pm. Trinity Church stands where Wall Street meets Broadway, about five minutes south; its churchyard, where Alexander Hamilton is buried near the southern fence, is open 8:30am to 4pm. From our door on John Street both are a walk of under ten minutes, and the earlier you go the emptier they are.
Downtown churches keep their ground while the towers go up around them. · Photo by Daniel Höhe on Unsplash
Two churches sit within ten minutes of us, both older than almost everything around them, both free, and neither one needs a ticket or a time slot. Guests usually find them by accident on the way to somewhere else. They're worth an hour on purpose.
The simplest way to do it is as a short line down Broadway. Start at St. Paul's Chapel, on Broadway between Fulton and Vesey, which is about a five-minute walk west of our door. Then keep going south on Broadway to Trinity Church, where Broadway meets Wall Street. The two are about five minutes apart. If you're already going to the 9/11 Memorial, St. Paul's is directly across from the site, so add it to that morning rather than making a separate trip.
Go early. Both churchyards open at 8:30am, and between 8:30 and 10 you'll be sharing them with commuters cutting through rather than tour groups. By midday in the fall the Trinity churchyard gets busy with people looking for one particular grave.
St. Paul's Chapel
· About a five-minute walk west from John Street · Free
The oldest surviving church building in Manhattan still in use, and the one that stayed standing when the towers came down across the street. Inside there are items honoring the 9/11 victims and the rescue and recovery workers who used the chapel as a place to rest during the months of the clean-up. The Bell of Hope stands outside. It is a quiet room and it is not a museum, so treat it accordingly: people do come here to sit. The chapel and its churchyard are open to the public 8:30am to 6pm. Give it twenty minutes if you're passing, forty if you read the panels, and pair it with the 9/11 Memorial pools since they're a two-minute walk apart.
Trinity Church and Trinity Churchyard
· About a ten-minute walk southwest from John Street, or five minutes on from St. Paul's · Free
The neo-Gothic church at the head of Wall Street, and for a long stretch of the 1800s the tallest thing in New York, which tells you something about how the skyline moved. Most people come for the churchyard rather than the nave. Alexander Hamilton is buried near the southern fence, his monument standing above the vault stone of his wife Eliza, and it is the single most-photographed spot in the yard. The churchyard is open 8:30am to 4pm, an earlier close than the chapel, so do Trinity second only if you're starting in the morning. Otherwise flip the order. Service times vary through the week, so check Trinity's own site if you'd rather see the interior without walking into a service.
