When she gets the chance, Omayra Rivera slips out of her office at Trinity Church, grabs a flashlight, mask and gloves, and climbs into the dusty darkness of the steeple that rises above St. Paul’s Chapel, a few blocks up Broadway.
There, in the 18th-century tower, she might peer into the hidden crevices beneath floorboards or examine graffiti from the time of James Monroe or pry open doors shut tight—maybe for a couple of centuries.
Here and there, she finds a treasure.
The 244-year-old chapel, the city’s oldest public building in continuous use, stands as one of Lower Manhattan’s most visited landmarks. But its 218-foot-high steeple, completed in 1794, had rarely if ever been seriously explored until earlier this year, when Rivera, Trinity Wall Street’s 37-year-old manager of business operations, got curious.
“I’d heard the maintenance guys talking,” she recalled. “They said, ‘You know, there’s stuff up here.’ So I climbed the stairs to see.”
Each of the nine levels is different, each a discovery of its own, with some floors containing an inviting assortment of nooks and crawl spaces waiting to be explored. In one room, sunlight filters through window slats, illuminating a snowy suspension of pigeon feathers among the many crisscrossing timbers. Other spaces are lit by a bare bulb or two, while still others provide no light at all.
To the uninitiated, ascending from one strange space to another, the steeple can feel like a disorienting and endless labyrinth of levels.
“When I first started climbing I said, ‘Is this the last level?’” Rivera recalled. “No, I can go higher and higher.”
She did not have to go far before she came across—in pristine condition—the panel from a box pew. Carved in the polished wood are the initials “GW.”
“I said, ‘Oh, my God. George Washington’s pew!’”
Stored alongside it is a panel from the pew of George Clinton, the first governor of New York. Both are from the early 1800s, postdating the pews now on display in the sanctuary that were reserved for the men when they were in office. Rivera speculated that the church replaced the original pews with these to honor its former esteemed congregants when the sanctuary was redesigned. (As President, Washington worshipped at St. Paul’s for about a year, from 1789 to 1790, while Trinity Church was being rebuilt.)
“I think [Trinity officials] knew about the panels but nobody paid much attention until I started climbing up here,” Rivera said.
Her hopes for rare finds grew stronger with another discovery: A leather fire bucket dated 1768.
“This is the spot where I found it,” Rivera said, shining her flashlight on an empty space in the floor as she took a reporter on a tour of the spire. “I was looking through the cracks with the flashlight and I saw something black and big in there. So I removed the wood and there it was.”
A bucket brigade saved St. Paul’s from destruction in the Great Fire of 1776 that destroyed the first Trinity Church and a quarter of the city as the British retook Manhattan. It is not known whether this bucket was among those that doused the chapel but it is believed likely.
“Now that we found the fire bucket there’s a lot more interest in what could be up here that no one knows about,” Rivera said.
Rivera’s experience as a volunteer at St. Paul’s after Sept. 11, when the chapel was a refuge for recovery workers, forged a greater affection for the church and interest in its history.
“Out of great tragedy came a love and passion for this place,” she said. “And then the history is so intriguing you want to know more about it. So it all fits together.”
Ascending the steeple’s ancient wooden ladders, Rivera enters the octagonal rooms like a spelunker maneuvering through the narrow walls of a cave. At five-foot-one, she is better suited than most for making her way through the many tight spaces. Still, squeezing and ducking among timbers and avoiding dangerous missteps requires caution.
Before heading upstairs, she lets it be known that if she is not back after an hour and a half, people should worry. “My mother thinks it’s a bad idea,” Rivera said. “She gets nervous when she hears I’m climbing a steeple.”
Then there are the stories that an actor buried in the churchyard haunts the place. Rivera doesn’t entirely dismiss the possibility. Her office door, she said, sometimes opens and closes on its own. “That began when I started digging upstairs,” she said. “I think maybe I just disturbed something.”
On the fifth level, where pigeon droppings coat nearly every surface, Rivera dons a mask and gloves. It was here that she found a 19th-century sarsaparilla bottle that now resides in the Trinity Church archives. She found it in a shallow gap in the floor. “I didn’t go in it,” she said. “I just kind of peeked, reached in and pulled it out.”
Other objects are intriguing just to visit. There is the rusty original clockworks, with their huge gears and timber base dated 1798. “I played with some of the cranks but you can’t really move anything,” Rivera said. “It’s just great to see. It’s great that it’s here.”
The “new” clockworks are on the second level—Rivera has made out a penciled date of 1917—and they operate the tower’s four clocks. The church gets calls about them, she said, because they give the wrong time. She wants to reset them. “There are instructions there,” she noted. “Maybe I need to see if I can figure it out.”
Two sets of bells occupy the fourth level, the originals dated 1798 and a larger set, from 1866, installed on the occasion of St. Paul’s centennial. Names are scrawled and carved on many walls, doors and beams, left by men who worked on the steeple, Rivera believes. “1857 JB Renwick Painter” reads one. “NKA” carefully carved his initials above the year 1826. Dannie Gardner signed his name in white lettering that still looks fresh. It’s dated August 25th, 1818, and it is the oldest graffiti Rivera has found so far.
She has yet to probe the top two levels, now missing floorboards and accessible only by a poorly secured ladder. So for now she considers them too dangerous, but vows to get up there one day.
Even then, she said, her search may not be over. The bucket was found in a spot where she had already looked, she said. That tells her that subway vibrations may be at play. “It makes me wonder what else is shifting around there that I didn’t see before.”
Besides, she added, her flashlight at the ready, “There are a lot of stories yet to be uncovered.”