CHAPTER XV

THE LAST YEARS ON BEEKMAN STREET:

1850-1856

" Had any one told me twenty years ago that I should live to see [this church]
abandoned as a place of religious worship, I should have thought him a romancer,
if not a madman; yet the hour of abandonment has come."—Gardiner Spring,
1856, "The Brick Church Memorial," p. 35.

"Lord, I have loved the habitation of thy house, and the place where thine
honor dwelleth."—Psalm 26 : 8.

SEVERAL allusions have already been made to
the great changes that had taken place in the
neighborhood of the Brick Church. The truth
was that during the eighty-odd years from the build¬
ing of the church to the middle of the nineteenth
century, the relation of the site on Beekman Street
to the rest of New York had been completely reversed.
In 1768 the church was at the extreme north end of
the city; almost all the residence quarter lay south¬
ward toward the Battery. In 1850, on the other hand,
so greatly had New York grown, that the church
found itself practically at the extreme south end of
the city; the homes of the people lay almost all to the
north of it. The change from residence to business
was not yet complete, for hotels and boarding-houses
were still to be found in that vicinity in considerable
numbers, but the private houses had moved away
northward and they had taken the congregation of
the Brick Church with them.

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