The little chapel that didn't lose a single window on 9/11

St. Paul's Chapel sits less than 100 yards from where the World Trade Center once stood, right at the edge of what became known as Ground Zero. More than two billion pounds of debris hit the ground on September 11, 2001, hard enough that seismographs 21 miles away picked up the shaking.

The 235-year-old chapel should have gone down with everything around it. It didn't. When workers finally got close enough to check, days later, they found the building standing untouched in the middle of a flattened city block — not one window broken.

Some things come through the worst of it still standing, still able to hold whoever needs holding.

Opened in 1766, St. Paul's is the oldest church building in Manhattan — and its survival came down to one tree. A roughly 100-year-old sycamore on the corner of the property took the blow that should have hit the wall behind it.

What happened next is the part worth remembering.

Within days, St. Paul's opened its doors to the recovery workers laboring across the street — and didn't close them again for nearly nine months. The choir loft became a dormitory, lined with beds for firefighters and construction crews too spent to make the trip home.

George Washington's own 18th-century pew became a podiatrist's chair, where blistered, torn-open feet got patched after 16 hours on twisted rubble. Chiropractors worked the aisles.

Someone played "Amazing Grace" on the grand piano every day, string quartets played through the noise, and long tables stayed stacked with fruit, candy, whatever anyone needed to keep going.

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Susan Watts/NY Daily News Archive/Getty Images

The recovery efforts at the chapel did not come from the top down. It took a village — a rotating cast of thousands who simply decided this was theirs to do. More than 15,000 volunteers came through: musicians, clergy, podiatrists, lawyers, soccer moms, and others whose shifts had already ended somewhere else.

They just kept showing up until, together, they'd served more than half a million meals, according to the Rev. Lyndon Harris, the chapel's priest, who ran the relief effort from the first week.

One construction worker who'd lost his sister-in-law that day said he'd cursed God when, almost by accident, he found the chapel door — and found strangers already inside, making sure he didn't have to carry his pain alone.

Outside, the wrought-iron fence filled with flags, photographs of the missing, and children's drawings, stretching a full city block: a wall of grief in front of a building that had somehow come through untouched.

Even the one part of the chapel that was severely wounded on 9/11 found its way back. The organ took in two and a half gallons of dust through its 1,680 pipes and sat silent for years, money too tight to fix it. It wasn't playable again until 2009 — in time for Easter Sunday.

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