#Trinity Corporation#

There stands on the corner of Broadway and Wall Street a towering brown-stone edifice, one of the most beautiful and most famous churches in America.  As a child I have walked through its church yard and read the quaint and touching inscriptions on its grave-stones; when I was a little older, and knew Wall Street, it seemed to me a sublime thing that here in the very heart of the world’s infamy there should be raised, like a finger of warning, this symbol of Eternity and Judgment.  Its great bell rang at noon-time, and all the traders and their wage-slaves had to listen, whether they would or no!  Such was Old Trinity to my young soul; and what is it in reality?

The story was told some ten years ago by Charles Edward Russell.  Trinity Corporation is the name of the concern, and it is one of the great landlords of New York.  In the early days it bought a number of farms, and these it has held, as the city has grown up around them, until in 1908 their value was estimated at anywhere from forty to a hundred million dollars.  The true amount has never been made public; to quote Russell’s words: 

The real owners of the property are the communicants of the church.  For 94 years none of the owners has known the extent of the property, nor the amount of the revenue therefrom, nor what is done with the money.  Every attempt to learn even the simplest fact about these matters has been baffled.  The management is a self perpetuating body, without responsibility and without supervision.

And the writer goes on to describe the business policy of this great corporation, which is simply the English land system complete.  It refuses to sell the land, but rents it for long periods, and the tenant builds the house, and then when the lease expires, the Corporation takes over the house for a nominal sum.  Thus it has purchased houses for as low as $200, and made them into tenements, and rented them to the swarming poor for a total of fifty dollars a month.  The houses were not built for tenements, they have no conveniences, they are not fit for the habitation of animals.

The article, in Everybody’s Magazine for July, 1908, gives pictures of them, which are horrible beyond belief.  To quote the writer again: 

Decay, neglect and squalor seem to brood wherever Trinity is an owner.  Gladly would I give to such a charitable and benevolent institution all possible credit for a spirit of improvement manifested anywhere, but I can find no such manifestation.  I have tramped the Eighth Ward day after day with a list of Trinity properties in my hand, and of all the tenement houses that stand there on Trinity land, I have not found one that is not a disgrace to civilization and to the City of New York.

It happens that I once knew the stately prelate who presided over this Corporation of Corruption.  I imagine how he would have shivered and turned pale