Peter Stuyvesant’s great-grandson, a family of Fish and Patti Smith walk into a church

The History of St. Mark’s Church in-the-Bowery: Part 1

By American standards, New York City is an old city, yet it has very few old buildings. Originally confined to the island of Manhattan, the need for space, as well as occasional fires, created a constant tearing down and rebuilding of structures. The city has always been more concerned with growth than sentiment and holds few places to experience something of its origins. That some of its oldest buildings are religious in nature is not especially surprising, but the story of one church stands out and is somewhat unexpected.

 Well before New York City got its name, the site in Manhattan at what is now the intersection of Second Avenue, 10th Street and Stuyvesant Street, was a site of worship. Since 1799, St. Mark’s Church in the Bowery has stood at that curious spot that defies the city’s street grid. But, the church itself is more a reflection of the city than an anomaly; It has grown and evolved as the city around it expanded and changed, becoming a center for both commerce and art.

A Dutch Colony

            The colony of New Netherland, a business venture of the Dutch West India Company, was developed to the exploit the abundance of North America, specifically the fur trade. The colony was governed locally by the director-general, and in 1647 Petrus Stuyvesant took up the position and residence in New Amsterdam, the capital of the colony (Lamb 1896: 127-130). The Dutch Reformed Church had a strong influence on the settlement, but it was an unruly place, a port town with numerous taverns, where pigs trampled gardens and neighbors regularly took one another to court for debts and both petty and egregious behavior (Van Laer 1974: 156-158). In 1660 Petrus Stuyvesant purchased the first of several large farms, or boweries, two miles north of the populated tip of Manhattan Island (Stokes 1915: 141-144).

Stuyvesant was confronted by a range of complaints and complications during his administration. Despite his efforts, the colony was a place that allowed a degree of religious and societal freedom. The residents of New Netherland included not only Dutch citizens but also Jews expelled from Brazil in 1654, Puritans banished from Massachusetts, Quakers, Walloons and Huguenots and enslaved Africans (Shorto 2005). 

In late August of 1664 a fleet of English ships sailed in to the harbor at New Amsterdam and demanded surrender of the colony. Less than two weeks later, at the urging of the local merchants, Stuyvesant obliged, having gained assurances that residents would be allowed to keep their property and worship as they wished. Without a cannon being fired, New Amsterdam and all of New Netherland became New York (Lamb 1896: 209-214).

An English Colony

After a trip to Holland to explain the situation, former Director-General Petrus Stuyvesant returned to his Manhattan farm (Lamb 1896: 214-216). He died there in 1672 and was interred in a vault under the family chapel (St. Mark’s Vestry 1899: 47, 179). He bequeathed his vast land holdings, including the neighborhood now called the East Village, to his children. 

            Under English rule the city of New York continued to grow slowly north up Manhattan, but it was still a relatively small place. The bulk of the island was rural, dotted with the occasional country house, or small villages. The make-up of the population included a range of people from countless places, and a variety of religions were represented in available places of worship. Trinity Church, at the intersection of Broadway and Wall Street, was the main Anglican (or Episcopal) church in the city, all others being chapels of the mother church. While the Dutch Reformed Church was still a powerful force, many of ruling class including the Stuyvesants, had become members of Trinity. 

Petrus Stuyvesant, the great-grandson of the former director-general, was born in 1727. His mother, like his great-grandmother, was a Bayard, and his extended family tree included connections to other founding families of New York. Petrus married Margaret, the daughter of Gilbert Livingston, and they had six children who lived into adulthood. Unsurprisingly, the children of Petrus and Margaret married into prominent New York families, including Winthrop, Ten Broeck, Reade, Fish and Rutherford among others. Petrus and his bachelor brother Nicholas William inherited the vast Stuyvesant land holdings, and Petrus passed them on to his children when he died in 1805 (Lamb 1896: 216-217). But well before his death he gave a part of the land to Trinity, so that a new church could be built on the site of the old Stuyvesant chapel, where the family vault held generations of not just Stuyvesants but also their extended family, neighbors, and slaves (St. Mark’s Vestry 1899: 110-111).

In 1788 Petrus commissioned a survey of his land that included laying out a regular grid of streets, closely aligned to the true north-south, east-west points. The streets were named after family members, the primary one being Stuyvesant Street (Koeppel 2015: 47-8). The old family chapel, the land that Petrus donated to Trinity, was bounded on one side by Stuyvesant Street (Lamb 1896: 188).  When the cornerstone for the new church was laid in 1795, the building was oriented to the street. 

“Map of Stuyvesant’s Bouwery,” from Martha Lamb’s History of the City of New York, vol. 1, p. 188. 
Number 2 is St. Mark’s Church. Next to it is the site of the director-general’s house. Number 7 is Petersfield, where his great-grandson Petrus lived. The streets surveyed by Petrus, including Stuyvesant Street, are shown over the current streets.

To be continued.

Sources Cited

Koeppel, Gerard. 2015. City on a Grid: How New York Became New York. New York: Da Capo Press.

Lamb, Martha J. and Mrs. Burton Harrison. 1896. History of the City of New York: Its Origin Rise, and Progress. Vol. 1. New York: A.S. Barnes and Co.

St. Mark’s Church Vestry. 1899. A Memorial of St. Mark’s Church in the Bowery. New York: Thomas Whittaker. 

Shorto, Russell. 2005. The Island at the Center of the World: The Epic Story of Dutch Manhattan and the Forgotten Colony That Shaped America. New York: Vintage.

Stokes, Isaac Newton Phelps. 1915-1928. The Iconography of Manhattan Island. New York: R. H. Dodd. Six volumes.

Van Laer, Arnold J.F. 1974. The Register of the Provincial Secretary, 1642-1647. Baltimore: The Genealogical Publishing Company.