It is New York's oldest standing Catholic church. And the first cathedral in the United States named after Ireland's patron saint. From 1815 till 1879, Old St. Patrick's Cathedral served the political, social and spiritual needs of New York's Irish Catholic community.
The modern St. Patrick's Cathedral - the Gothic extravaganza on fashionable Fifth Avenue - has come to symbolize the hard-won acceptance of Irish Catholics in Protestant America. But as church and congregation moved uptown, the landmark building on Mott Street in lower Manhattan was largely forgotten. Although still called a cathedral, the 1879 opening of the new St Patrick's effectively relegated Old St Patrick's to the status of a parish church. Ironically, while the towering spires of the Fifth Avenue namesake have been eclipsed by taller midtown skyscrapers, the less pretentious downtown church remains pleasantly in scale with its present-day neighbourhood of Little Italy.
Anti-immigrant mobs
In a city where cemeteries are generally open and accessible, one of the most striking architectural features of Old St. Patrick's is the fortress-like enclosure of its historic burial ground. The brick wall, ten feet high, was erected in 1836 when anti-immigrant mobs - precursors of the Know-Nothing movement - threatened to burn the cathedral.
On more than one occasion, armed parishioners stood guard in the cemetery through the night, with bricks knocked from the wall to create loopholes for musket fire. These alarms subsided significantly after 1844, when St Patrick's outspoken bishop John Hughes confronted New York's newly-elected nativist mayor James Harper.
Reacting to Harper's thinly-veiled threat that he could not control his followers, the Tyrone-born bishop warned the mayor that if any harm came to his churches, his parishioners would turn New York into "a second Moscow".
Hughes's reference to the scorched-earth tactics of the Russians, who burned their capital in the face of Napoleon's advance, brought both sides to their senses. But this confrontational style earned Hughes the nickname "Dagger John" after a political opponent speculated that the traditional symbol preceding the bishop's signature (actually a cross) must really be a stiletto. In modern times, the wall around Old St Patrick's has created a secluded oasis in the bustling inner-city neighbourhood. This transformation was captured in Mean Streets, Martin Scorsese's classic 1973 film, when the Italian-American hoodlums played by Robert De Niro and Harvey Keitel find refuge among the tombstones of Old St Patrick's.
Records lost
Visitors with a more genealogical bent are apt to be disappointed. The cathedral's burial records have been lost or destroyed, while weather and time have made many of the early inscriptions illegible. What is known is that 32,153 burials took place there between 1813, when interments were first officially recorded, and 1833, when a satellite cemetery was opened.
However, surnames such as Carroll, Dougherty, Kelly and Redden on pre-1813 tombstones show that the Irish community was using the ground as early as 1801.
Prominent parishioners among those known to be buried in the churchyard and in the vaults beneath the old cathedral are Thomas O'Conor, the United Irish refugee who edited New York's first Irish newspaper, The Shamrock, and his American-born son Charles, a prominent 19th-century lawyer who was the first Catholic nominated for the US presidency. The remains of New York's second bishop, John Connolly from Drogheda, rest in the crypt of Old St. Patrick's. The first bishop, Connolly's fellow Dominican Luke Concannen, died in Europe before reaching his American diocese.
The brief career of Michael O'Gorman, another cleric buried in the old cemetery, sheds an interesting light on the status of the Irish language in pre-Famine New York. Recruited by Connolly at St. Kieran's, Kilkenny, O'Gorman accompanied the bishop to New York in 1815. In August 1824 (just three months before his death)Fr O'Gorman preached in Irish to an overflow congregation at the old cathedral. The ensuing collection of $450 for an extension of the cemetery - a very considerable sum in those days - suggests an audience that both appreciated and understood the Irish-language sermon.
First Italian opera
Also in the vaults lie four generations of the Lynch family, beginning with the Galway-born Dominick Sr, a prominent wine merchant in colonial New York. In 1825, his son, Dominick Jr, brought an entire operatic company from London to New York in one of the Lynch family's ships. The Garcia Company's November 1825 performance at New York's Park Theatre was the first Italian opera heard in the United States. The cathedral's Irish connections were recognized this month. On surrounding streets, costumed re-enactors traced the April 1861 parade of the New York State Militia's famed 69th Regiment as it departed for the Civil War and a bloody baptism-of-fire at Bull Run.
Inside the cathedral, a more sombre occasion was recalled with a Requiem Mass. The original service, held on January 16, 1863, was for the dead of the Irish Brigade, recently decimated at the battles of Antietam and Fredericksburg. The brigade's three New York regiments, including the 69th, included many members of Old St Patrick's parish.