Located just across Church St. from “Ground Zero”, the former site of the World Trade Center, the Episcopalian chapel was a place of rest and solace for the many emergency workers who attended to the disaster site. Police, firemen, and medical personnel often slept in the traditional pews, their boots and equipment scarring the wood. From all across the country and around the world, messages of support and sympathy including home-made banners and signs were sent and pinned up on the walls of the chapel and on the old iron fence surrounding it and the churchyard.

But recently the old pews, which some claim were rendered “sacred” by the scars of the emergency workers, were removed entirely on orders of the chapel’s clergy. Chairs, brought in from the shut Chapel of St. Cornelius on Governors Island were cleaned up, replaced the old pews and were set up in a modish circular arrangement around a movable altar in the center of the church. The old pews were placed in a nearby storage facility, except for President Washington’s pew, and two pews put to the side as a memento of 9/11 for visitors.

“Since 9/11, the chapel has experienced enormous growth, in terms of community programs, fellowship programs and so on - and we’ve got to have some way to accommodate them all,” the Rev. Stuart Hoke, the retiring priest in charge of St. Paul’s, told the media. “The key is flexibility”.

Meanwhile, Earl Tucker, a concert director for Trinity Church (of which St. Paul’s is a chapel-of-ease) said that the new modern set-up “will allow for myriad performance opportunities; music may be joined by theatre and interdisciplinary installations”.

Not everyone has been pleased with tearing up the old pews and putting in movable chairs. When the Chapel invited comments on its website about what it calls “the Pew Project” many, including some of the 9/11 workers, registered their extreme sadness at what they perceived as a lack of recognition of the special nature of the pews.

“While I understand the desire to make St. Paul’s more adapatible to various events, I am saddened that the pews are going to be removed,” writes Kim Mann of Middletown, New York. “I have a dear friend who was one of the rescue workers. … Whenever I go, I sit for a few moments in the pew on which my friend rested … I look at the scuff marks and wonder if any of them were from him. Sitting in that pew and looking at it and the others is incredibly meaningful and moving.”

George Kirjanov was a volunteer at St. Paul’s in the days after September 11. “Along with many others, I witnessed how these individuals prayed, wept, pondered and rested on the pews now slated to be taken away. It struck me as I recently passed through St. Paul’s, that these pews resonate with the redeeming power of God’s love.”

“No new arrangement of chairs could replace the power of these pews,” Mr. Kirjanov continued, “burnished and scuffed by those who acted from profound faith, and who came to St. Paul’s Chapel for spiritual sustenance and renewal before returning to the labor of salvaging hope from an immeasurable tragedy; succeeding in doing so by their very acts. These pews, in my opinion and in the opinion of so many others, belong in St. Paul’s Chapel as much as the pew where President Washington sat. Let them remain where they are, so others seeking answers to life’s most confounding questions will rest upon them and know that at the worst of times, God’s hope is available to those most in need of His divine grace.”

The chapel, built in 1764, is the oldest public building in New York, and survived the great fires that destroyed most of lower Manhattan’s buildings from the Dutch and British periods. St. Paul’s was built as a chapel-of-ease by the Church of England parish of Trinity Church on Wall Street for its members who lived in what was then the northern edge of New York, and remains a part of the Trinity parish to this day. It was modeled in large part on St. Martin-in-the-Fields in London, with its side galleries and a Palladian window behind the altar.

St. Paul’s was the site of the service of thanksgiving which followed the inauguration of George Washington as President on the balcony of New York’s old city hall in April, 1789. The pew where Washington regularly worshipped during his presidency, with one of the earliest representations of the Great Seal of the United States above it, has been preserved. Across the church from Washington’s pew is that of Governor George Clinton, the first governor of the independent State of New York (and not to be confused with a previous governor of the Province of New York with the same name).

The chapel became well-known after the attacks of September 11 and now receives over 25,000 visitors each year.