Trinity Church, sitting at the head of Wall Street with its brownstone spire pointed straight up. The church faces east, so it has spent a hundred and eighty years looking straight down the length of that street, directly at the money.
When this building was finished in eighteen forty-six, that spire made it the tallest structure in New York. It held the title for more than forty years. Everything you can see from here was built later, and taller, and every one of them had to get past a church first.
In the graveyard on the south side, close enough to the fence to read from the sidewalk, there's a white marble monument with a pyramid on top. Four urns at the corners. That's Alexander Hamilton.
He was shot on the eleventh of July, eighteen oh-four, on a rock ledge across the river in Weehawken, New Jersey. The ball broke a rib, went through his liver, and lodged in his spine. He was rowed back across the Hudson conscious and in agony and died the next afternoon, thirty-one hours late
r, in a friend's house on Jane Street.
The funeral was two days after that.
The city shut down. Shops closed, ships in the harbor dropped their flags to half mast, and British and French warships fired minute guns as the procession moved — two navies not on especially warm terms with America, or with each other. Thousands of people lined the streets to watch it pass.
The eulogy was given from a
