Just one week after the British invaded Manhattan in September 1776, a suspicious fire destroyed as much as a quarter of the city, hundreds of the estimated four thousand buildings. A hastily organized bucket brigade drawing water from the Hudson River saved St. Paul's Chapel, which had opened in 1766 and remains Manhattan's oldest and only existing prerevolutionary public building in continuous use.
The fire was said to have broken out shortly after midnight at the Fighting Cocks Tavern near Whitehall Slip. It quickly consumed Trinity Church, but the Reverend Charles Inglis, Trinity's assistant minister, rallied men, women, and children to soak the roof of St. Paul's, about a third of a mile away. The fire not only inflicted immediate hardship but would exacerbate the misery inflicted by the prolonged British occupation of New York. Survivors pitched canvas tents on the charred ruins. Loyalists flooded into the city, and both public and private buildings were appropriated to house them and billet British troops.
Patriots suspected the British of setting the blaze; the British, meanwhile, suspected American arsonists, and with good reason. George Washington disclaimed any advance knowledge of the fire but wrote his cousin: "Providence or some good honest Fellow, has done more for us than we were disposed to do for ourselves." As a result of their suspicions, the British imposed martial law for the duration of their seven-year occupation. (Perhaps not coincidentally, on that very day, Nathan Hale was arrested in Queens as an American spy.) Their cruel treatment of captured American soldiers consigned to filthy prison ships off Brooklyn may have been another consequence of the suspicion and animosity that the fire created in the occupied city.
St. Paul's miraculous survival in the Great Fire was mirrored on September 11, 2001, when the World Trade Center collapsed. Standing in the shadow of the Twin Towers, the church was unharmed. Not a single window was broken. For months, the chapel served as a sanctuary for police, firemen, construction workers, and volunteers at the site. The iron gates of the chapel were festooned with photographs of the missing, teddy bears, flowers, and other tributes.
About a decade later, Omayra Rivera, St. Paul's thirty-seven-year-old program director, maneuvered herself behind the 1804 pipe organ and made her way to the steeple after hearing maintenance workers discussing artifacts they discovered there. She found what may have been evidence of the chapel's original miracle: a three-gallon leather bucket marked "St. Paul's, 1768," the year when tougher fire regulations took effect.
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