There are few buildings in New York City that have witnessed more Irish American history than Old St. Patrick’s Cathedral on Mulberry Street north of Little Italy. Although overshadowed by the elegant Gothic Cathedral in Midtown that later replaced it, The Basilica of Saint Patrick's Old Cathedral, which opened in 1815, is the original Cathedral Church of the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of New York. The Basilica is the third oldest Catholic Church in New York City after the Church of the Ascension in Chinatown and St. Peter’s on Barclay Street in Lower Manhattan. The history of the church is so intertwined with the history of Irish in New York City that they are inseparable. Its long, fascinating history reveals a lot about the struggles of early Irish immigrants in New York City.
The cornerstone of the Cathedral was laid in 1809 at a time when the Catholic community in Manhattan was tiny, but the small, though rapidly growing area had been named by the Pope as a see, so it needed a Cathedral. The site, which had previously been used by St. Peter’s Church as a graveyard, lay in what was then still a rural area north of town. Its construction, which lasted until 1815, was overseen by the French-born architect Joseph François Mangin, who also designed New York’s City Hall.
Many of the first parishioners were impoverished Irish immigrants who were too poor to afford a marble structure, so Mangin used Manhattan fieldstone in north and south walls. The basilica, however, was a bold architectural statement by a community that had only been allowed to build a Catholic Church after the repeal of New York State’s Anti-Catholic laws in 1784. It measured 120 feet long and 80 feet wide, making it the city’s largest church and the largest Cathedral in America at that time. Its walls were each adorned with eight arched, stained-glass windows divided into three sections and topped with elegant gothic tracery.
One of the principal fundraisers for the basilica was Pierre Toussaint, who has been declared “venerable” by the Catholic church, a step on the road to sainthood. Born a slave in the French colony of Saint-Domingue, now Haiti, Toussaint was brought to New York in 1797 by his French owners. He became the top hair stylist to the city’s Protestant elite and soon became a wealthy patron of the church, as well as a founder of an orphanage for African American children.
The Cathedral played a central role in the saga of the Irish in New York. For the first sixteen years of its existence the basilica was the ending point for the St. Patrick’s Day parade and for decades after the archbishop greeted the marchers on the steps of the cathedral until the parade moved uptown to the new Saint Patrick’s. The first bishop to preside in the church was Irishman John Connolly of the Dominican order. The new Cathedral suffered from an acute shortage of priests and in 1820 Connolly ordained Irishman Richard Bulger who has the honor of being the first Catholic priest ordained in New York. The Irish who were the largest group in the church hoped that one of their own would be named as New York’s bishop and they were bitterly disappointed when the Pope named Frenchman Jean Dubois who spoke only broken English to succeed Connolly as bishop. Dubois angered his Irish parishioners by claiming that Saint Patrick was French, not Irish. In 1836, though, Dubois, who would become America’s first Catholic saint, ordained German John Neuman at Old Saint Patrick’s.
The growing influx of impoverished Irish Catholics was agitating the city’s Protestant, Anglophile and nativist majority, who saw the church and its members as a threat to America. They spread conspiracy theories that the Pope was secretly planning to take over the United States through a continuing influx of Catholics who were controlled by Irish bishops. At the same time, many lurid anti-Catholic gothic novels stoked violence, especially an 1836 work by a disturbed young Protestant woman named Maria Monk, who had converted to Catholicism and claimed she was forced by nuns to have sex with priests and give birth to babies who were then baptized and killed. Frightened by the growing specter of violence targeting the church, Saint Patrick’s trustees voted in 1834 to build a fortress-like wall around the church to protect it from Nativist attacks.
Building the wall would prove visionary. Two years after its construction a Nativist mob marched up from the Bowery to burn the Cathedral, but “its advance scouts reported back on the fearsomeness of the Gaels’ military preparations and the fortress like impregnability of their walled cathedral,” wrote the historians Mike Wallace and Edwin G. Burrows in their book “Gotham.” The Nativists retreated. That same year the Ancient Order of Hibernians formed to defend the church from the threat of Nativist violence. The Hibernians had their headquarters across the street from the basilica and the Hibernians Manhattan chapter still meets in the basilica.
In 1842, Bishop Dubois died and was replaced by perhaps the greatest figure in the history of the New York Archdiocese, “Dagger John” Hughes from County Tyrone. Ordained in 1826 as a priest for the Diocese of Philadelphia, Hughes achieved distinction as a young cleric by vigorously defending Catholicism and the Catholic Church against Nativist slanders. In the early 1830s, he engaged in written and oral debates with the Presbyterian theologian Dr. John Breckenridge, which brought Hughes renown as the premier defender of the Faith.
Two years later, the threat of an attack against the church returned after a pair of Catholic churches were torched in Philadelphia. As New York nativists planned a massive rally, Hughes warned that attacks on Catholic churches would be met in kind. Alluding to the Russians’ scorched-earth strategy in their war against the invading Napoleonic army, Hughes told New York’s Nativists that “if a single Catholic church were burned in New York, the city would become a Moscow.” With the bishop’s permission, Hibernians with guns patrolled the streets outside the cathedral. This scene of well-armed Irish-Catholic defending the church was dramatized in the 2002 film “Gangs of New York,” directed by Martin Scorsese, who was once an altar boy at St. Patrick’s Old Cathedral.
Hughes became New York’s first archbishop when it became an archdiocese in October of 1850. In 1844, John McCloskey became a coadjutor bishop to John Hughes. He would later succeed Hughes as Archbishop becoming the first American-born Archbishop. McCloskey would play a seminal role in restoring the basilica after a fire gutted much of the church in 1866.
Although the cathedral was then the largest religious structure in the city, Archbishop Hughes envisioned a new and grander cathedral uptown, to serve as a "public architectural monument of the present and prospective greatness of this metropolis." Land for a new cathedral on Fifth Avenue and 50th Street was purchased in 1852 and in 1858, Hughes presided over the laying of the cornerstone of the new Saint Patrick’s Cathedral in midtown, but the huge new cathedral was not completed until 1879 when Old St. Patrick’s ceased to be the Cathedral of the Archdiocese and became a parish church.
One of the most amazing relics of the basilica is its magnificent 1868 Henry Erben pipe organ, a 19th-century American masterpiece and the last remaining large, intact pipe organ built by Erben, the leading American pipe organ builder in the mid-19th century, whose organs have never been surpassed in quality and craftsmanship. The organ, which featured some 2,500 pipes is a national treasure and its restoration is the object of a fundraising campaign chaired by film director Martin Scorsese.
One of the most fascinating features of the basilica is a catacomb which is the final resting place of some of the most famous New York Catholics. Hughes was interred here from his death in 1864 until he was disinterred in 1879 and moved to the new St. Patrick’s Cathedral. Among the most famous burials here are of Pierre Toussaint, “Honest John” Kelly, Boss William Tweed’s successor at Tammany Hall; Charles O’Conor, the lawyer who took down Tweed; and the Delmonico family, restaurateurs credited with introducing baked Alaska, eggs Benedict and lobster Newburg. You can even take a candlelight tour of the catacombs at old Saint Patrick’s.
In 1966, St. Patrick's Old Cathedral was one of the first sites to be named a landmark by the New York City Landmarks Commission. In 1977, St. Patrick's Old Cathedral and the Old Cathedral School were listed on the National Registry of Historic Landmarks. On March 17, 2010, Saint Patrick’s Old Cathedral was declared a minor basilica by Pope Benedict XVI.
