This is New York: St. Paul's Chapel

St. Paul's is eighteenth-century New York, as good an example as remains in this city in which late nineteenth-century structures are so often looked upon as remnants from the Middle Ages. St. Paul's really is a remnant, but a distinguished one. 

Its model was James Gibb's masterpiece, the Church of St. Martin's-in-the-Fields in London, and it is no exaggeration to say that St. Paul's is New York's premier Georgian church, much as Trinity is the city's premier Gothic Revival church. The interior, despite the pink-and-blue paint job which gives it a bit of the air of a nursery, is gracious and welcoming, and good enough to be worth a look at as architectural space, not as a mere anachronism.

It is the outside that is best, however. Lawrence's tower, added almost thirty years after the church itself was completed, is of rough stone, a lovely counterpoint to the carefully wrought quoins of the main building.

The surrounding cemetery is a gracious oasis in a pressured part of the city; there is drama in the view of the World Trade Center towers through the trees of the churchyard, the great metal hulks looming over eighteenth-century gravestones. The passage of time could not be made more visible.