Trinity Church: Alexander Hamilton's Final Rest

Why is it significant?

Stand at the western end of Wall Street and gaze directly up at the soaring two-hundred-and-eighty-one-foot brownstone spire of Trinity Church, framed perfectly by the towering office towers on either side.

Key Facts

Open the walk

Stand at the western end of Wall Street and gaze directly up at the soaring two-hundred-and-eighty-one-foot brownstone spire of Trinity Church, framed perfectly by the towering office towers on either side. Consecrated in eighteen forty-six and designed by architect Richard Upjohn, this Gothic Revival masterpiece was the tallest structure in the United States for decades, serving as a beacon for ships entering New York Harbor.

Why does Wall Street point directly at this church? In sixteen fifty-three, the Dutch governor Peter Stuyvesant built a wooden palisade wall right along this path to defend the colony of New Amsterdam from Native American raids and New England English colonists. That wall gave Wall Street its name. When the wall was dismantled in sixteen ninety-nine, King William the Third chartered Trinity Church at its western terminus.

Step through the gates into the south graveyard. Surrounded by skyscraper glass sits an elegant white marble pyramid obelisk: the final resting place of Alexander Hamilton. Nearby lies his devoted wife, Elizabeth Schuyler Hamilton, who survived him by fifty years, working tirelessly to preserve his legacy and founding New York's first private orphanage.

In July eighteen zero-four, Hamilton was mortally wounded across the Hudson River in Weehawken in a duel with Vice President Aaron Burr. As you stand between Hamilton's tomb and the roar of Wall Street, you are gazing at the founder who foresaw America not as a rural agrarian society, but as a commercial, industrial, and financial powerhouse that would one day lead the world.