In regard to the organ, the Weekly Register of Baltimore has this to say: 

     “A great business this for a ship of the line....  Now a
     gentleman might suppose that this article would have passed
     harmless.”

St. John’s Park, now obliterated and given over to the modernism of the Hudson River Railroad Company, used, in the early fifties, to be still fashionable.  Old New Yorkers given to remembrance speak regretfully of the quiet and peace and beauty of the Old Park—­which is no more.  But St. John’s is still with us, “sombre and unalterable,” as one writer describes it, “a stately link between the present and the past.”

And doubtless nearly everyone who reads these pages knows of St. John’s famous “Dole”—­the Leake Dole, which has been such a fruitful topic for newspaper writers for decades back.

John Leake and John Watts, in the year 1792, founded the Leake and Watts’ Orphan House and John Leake, in so doing, added this curious bequest: 

“I hereby give and bequeathe unto the rector and inhabitants of the Protestant Episcopal Church of the State of New York one thousand pounds, put out at interest, to be laid out in the annual income in sixpenny wheaten loaves of bread and distributed on every Sabbath morning after divine service, to such poor as shall appear most deserving.”

This charity has endured through the years and is now the trust of St. John’s.  I have been told—­though I do not vouch for it—­that the bread is given out not after divine service but very early in the morning, when the grey and silver light of the new day will not too mercilessly oppress the needy and unfortunate, some of them once very rich, who come for the Dole.

In 1822 St. Luke’s was built—­also a part of the elastic Trinity Parish, and probably the best-known church, next to old St. John’s, that stands in Greenwich Village today.

The prejudices of the English Church in early New York prevented the Catholics from gaining any sort of foothold until after the British evacuation.  In 1783 St. Peter’s, the first Roman Catholic Church, was erected at Barclay Street, and much trouble they had, if account may be relied on.  The reported tales of an escaped nun did much to inflame the bigoted populace, but this passed, and today St. Joseph’s, which was built in 1829, stands on the corner of Washington Place and Sixth Avenue.

It is not far away, by the bye, that the old Jewish cemetery is to be found.  Alderman Curran quaintly suggested that an unwarned stranger might easily stub his toe on the little graveyard on Eleventh Street.  It is Beth Haim, the Hebrew Place of Rest, close to Milligan Lane.  The same Eleventh Street, which (as we shall see later) was badly handicapped by “the stiff-necked Mr. Henry Brevoort” cut half of Beth Haim away.  But a corner of it remains and tranquil enough it seems, not to say pleasant, though almost under the roar of the Elevated.