Art and History, Downtown, Uptown, and Is That a Ghost at Jumel Terrace?

Trinity Church, Hamilton’s grave, and Washington’s fight for Manhattan. Plus, the Morris-Jumel house gets a look.

‘T he Bronx is up and the Battery’s down,” sang three sailors in On the Town, as tuneful as a musical can be. There’s nothing about the Bronx here but a place close to it: Madame Jumel’s house on West 160th Street, now called the Morris-Jumel Mansion. It was Washington’s headquarters during the Battle of Harlem Heights and is still Manhattan’s oldest standing house. It’s linked with Trinity Church in odd and poignant ways.

Trinty Church, at the top of Wall Street and a short walk from Bowling Green Park and Fraunces Tavern, is a Gothic Revival pile from the early 1840s and very High Church Episcopal. Designed by the British-American architect Richard Upjohn, it’s a grand thing, with a soaring spire, lancet windows, sculptures of tall, skinny saints, pointed arches, trefoils, tracery, and finials aplenty. Its uninspiring stained glass from 1846, above the altar, is among the earliest in America.

In 2022, the church commissioned the British stained glass artist Thomas Denny to create a 60-foot window above the church’s front door. It depicts the Parable of the Talents, the book of Matthew’s take on investing — good theme for the hood — and Matthew’s Judgment of the Nations in which, at the Second Coming, humanity is divided into the good sheep and the bad goats. That’s not the squishy Episcopalianism I know. And how can people tell who’s good and bad, who’s a sheep and who’s a goat, after that second post-Sunday-service martini? The window’s not only very red, it’s backlit, so it’s meant to dazzle from Wall Street, in front of the church and sloping downhill. I like it, though from the outside it looks like there’s a fire inside.

Trinity’s endowment is $6 billion, the biggest of any church in the world. Learning that, I nearly fainted. That’s a lotta shillings and pence. Why so rich? It’s still got early-18th-century Manhattan land grants from Queen Anne, that’s why. A major New York philanthropy, the Trinity Church dispenses millions of dollars in gifts, lots going to illegal-alien groups and rent and food support for the poor, also to less-well-off Episcopal dioceses. Last year the church finished a $112 million renovation. Everything’s now pristine.

Down the road is St. Paul’s Chapel, which belongs to Trinity. It opened in 1766 and is New York’s oldest church building. Inspired by James Gibbs’s London churches, it is boxy, high-end spartan, and elegant. Washington worshipped there after his inauguration as president in 1789. It isn’t used for services anymore. Heartbreakingly, it was open for prayer, counseling, and rest for workers aiding in recovery and debris removal in the days after 9/11. That it wasn’t destroyed is a miracle. St. Pauls’ and Trinity were America’s tallest buildings in their day, but now the Freedom Tower and much else make them look like toys.

The marquee bones in Trinity’s old graveyard are Alexander Hamilton’s, buried with his wife’s. He and his family worshipped there. Hamilton died on July 12, 1804, in a sensational duel with Aaron Burr, the sitting vice president of the U.S. and a skunk and intriguer nonpareil. Burr claimed that Hamilton had slandered him years before in a letter. Hamilton neither denied nor confirmed this — “it’s old hat,” he suggested — but a duel ensued and Hamilton got a little but fatal hole in him. He and Burr saw each other from afar at a July Fourth party at Fraunces Tavern a week before the duel. Hamilton nodded mirthlessly. Burr responded with a thin, malignant smile.

Hamilton’s handsome white-marble monument top sits on a square base with a Roman urn on each corner. The base, topped by a pyramid, has fluted pilasters and a doting inscription. Trinity’s vicar at the time, Benjamin Moore, didn’t want Hamilton buried there, since dueling was not only illegal in New York — the reason the pair held the duel in Weehawken in less picky New Jersey — but a violation of Christian duty. Hamilton, speaking with Moore on his death bed, said he not only forgave Burr but, would, if he lived, lead the charge in making dueling a federal crime. Moore relented, Hamilton died, and his remains were interred in a slice of Trinity’s real estate bounty.

Now, up, up, and away to Washington Heights near the northern tip of Manhattan, to Jumel Terrace and to Madame Jumel’s house. The house is closed to the public and covered with scaffolding while being restored, but it’s still as much in business as possible. I went on a very good tour of part of the old cellar kitchen, now the gift shop and a gallery, focused mostly on slavery, then the exterior, grounds, and neighborhood.

As Fraunces Tavern is the oldest surviving commercial building in New York, the Morris-Jumel Mansion is Manhattan’s oldest still-standing house, built in 1765 and for the most part architecturally original. Roger Morris, a retired colonel in the British army, and his wife, Mary Philipse, a local heiress from an old Dutch family, built it as a summer retreat. They lived most of the year near Bowling Green, steps from Fraunces Tavern, on Stone Street.

The Morrises built their Palladian Revival house with a grand portico and Tuscan columns about eleven miles north of Stone Street. It’s still in Manhattan but on one of its highest, breeziest points, with views of the Hudson, Westchester, the Battery, and once bucolic New Jersey. They soon added an octagonal addition, one of the first such spaces in America. Until the late 19th century, the neighborhood was mostly woods and farms. Then, in the 1910s, it was developed as homes for New York’s most affluent black families and artists. A chunk of the Harlem Renaissance unfolded there.

Benjamin West painted Roger’s portrait, Copley did Mary’s, and all was well for the power couple. Roger’s family in London was part of the arts establishment, Mary’s here was rich from farms and the slave trade. They were, no surprise, Loyalists, so they landed in deep doo-doo starting in the mid-1770s. Roger left temporarily for London, Mary for Philipse Manor, her family’s home in Yonkers, while their summer house became, over five weeks in 1776, Washington’s headquarters during the Battle of Harlem Heights. Washington did indeed sleep there and used the Octagon Room as his office. The house later served as the headquarters of the British General Henry Clinton and, after that, as the Hessian headquarters, making it one of the few places to house all three military commanders.

The Battle of Harlem Heights was fought around where Columbia is today and around West 150th Street and Broadway on September 16, 1776, following the Patriot fiasco at the Battle of Long Island. Harlem Heights was the aftermath and also a rout for the Patriots, but it was the first time British troops actually retreated in battle, though only for a bit. The Patriots fled to Jersey and lived to fight another day, barely. Roger returned to Manhattan and served as a Loyalist official during the British military rule of the city, which lasted until 1783. He and Mary then moved to London, never to return. Mary, by the by, was charged alongside her sister with high treason by New York State. The state, all along, wanted to grab Mary’s money and her thousands of acres of land — New York’s tax collectors learned their money-grubbing ways early — but next to nothing came of it. She died in England in 1825, at 95, Roger much earlier, in 1794.

The house and its hundred-plus acres? Once the war was over, New York State did manage to confiscate it to pay war debts. It was intact enough for a lavish dinner party on July 12, 1790, attended by Washington, now the president, Martha Washington, Thomas Jefferson, John and Abigail Adams, and the Hamiltons, among others. It was Washington’s first cabinet dinner. If walls could talk. Martha’s lettuce and plum tarts were served along with asparagus ragoo, dressed fish rémoulade, sausages, cake, and cider. Yum, yum, yum. For the next 20 years, it was a tavern, then an inn. Tenants farmed the land.

Here enters the formidable Madame Jumel. She was born Eliza Bowen in Providence in 1775, possibly in a bordello, her father a sailor, and her mother, well, brought her up in a bordello before Eliza and her sister went to a workhouse. After being indentured to a sea captain and his family, Eliza went in the 1790s to New York, where she changed her name to Eliza Brown. She hit the jackpot in 1804 when she married Stephen Jumel, a French merchant who had fled the French Revolution for Haiti and then New York. Eliza became an Episcopalian, joined Trinity Church, and, in 1810, bought the old, forlorn house. The Jumels used it as a summer place, too. Social oddballs in New York — Eliza had that gamy past — they went off and on France.

Stephen Jumel grew rich in France, Haiti, and New York through land and investing. In another of Madame Jumel’s lifelong twists and turns, she returned from France in 1826 with Stephen’s power of attorney over his American holdings. They soon became hers — and was she ever shrewd when it came to money. She became the richest woman in New York. Stephen returned in 1828 and died in the house on Jumel Place in 1832. He’d fallen off his hay wagon onto his own pitchfork. Oops, ouch, and adieu.

Her next-to-last twist and turn came a bit more than a year after Stephen died, when she married Aaron Burr, then 77 to her 58. Burr was well-born, a Princetonian, brave, a pillar of the Revolution, neurotic, a home wrecker, the father of Tammany Hall, a pioneer of bare-knuckled American politics, nearly president in 1800, a conniver, a murderer, probably a traitor, an exile, and a striver who wanted to be king of Mexico. In the end, he was just another New York lawyer, but deep in debt. He wooed and pestered Eliza, turning up once at midnight with a parson and proposing that they elope. They married on July 1, 1833.

Whatever bliss they shared evaporated as she saw her bank balance dwindle, courtesy of Burr’s mischief. After four months, she kicked him out. She was about to sign their divorce papers when she got word that Burr had died hours before. It’s thought that her lawyer was Alexander Hamilton Jr. Making lemonade from the lemon called Burr, she touted herself as a widow, the Honorable Madame Burr, for the rest of her life. She died at 95, still rich, at her Jumel Terrace manse.

It’s a historic-preservation story with a happy ending, sort of. Of course, there was litigation over her estate among the Jumel and Brown clans. The house eventually went to a family who understood its history and treated it well. I’ll leap to 1903 when the city bought it, spurred in part by the Daughters of the American Revolution. Today, the outside of the house is scaffolded and the inside is closed, but what’s inside? There are nine period rooms divided into three styles: Georgian for the Morrises, Federal for Washington’s era, and Empire for the Jumel days. There’s plenty of Duncan Phyfe furniture and a French sleigh bed that Madame Jumel claimed once belonged to Empress Josephine, though we know now it didn’t. The kitchen is from colonial days. A full-length portrait of Eliza and her two adopted grandchildren from 1854 is very grand.

Most of the rooms have historic wallpapers with doves, morning-glory vines, vases, fanciful fountains, mostly green but with flashes of blue, orange, pink, and lilac. The Octagon Room, once Washington’s office, has pretty blue wallpaper with cloud motifs. Carpeting and drapery in the house is mostly Empire-style. It’s been 30 years since I’ve been inside the house, but I looked at dozens of current interior shots. The dining room glitters with fine china and crystal. Not much of the decoration is original to the house, but they’ve done their best. The exterior project will give the place a new roof, handicapped access, period-sensitive new windows, and renovated columns. Water issues will be addressed, too. Work started late last year and will likely be done in the fall.

A “sort of” happy ending? My visit ended where this story begins, at Trinity Church. Not the church overlooking Wall Street where Alexander Hamilton rests but Trinity’s vast auxiliary cemetery by Audubon Place and West 153rd Street. There, Madame Jumel rests, or does she? It’s no secret that the Morris-Jumel Mansion is considered haunted. Eliza’s been seen, we’re told, hushing noisy school groups from the house’s balcony. Things have been known to move. Measurements of electromagnetic waves have gone through its leaky roof. Paranormal investigators over the years cite the house’s “residual energy” from past occupants. Duke Ellington lived in a luxe apartment building at the bottom of the Morris-Jumel’s front yard. He wrote “Mood Indigo” there. The spooks at Jumel Terrace might be taking the tune too literally.