When America was a colony under English rule, Catholic worship was prohibited. Following the Revolutionary War, New York City served as a temporary capital of the newly independent United States. This prominence brought many foreign ambassadors and businessmen to the city, some of whom were Catholic, including several members of Congress. A small group of city residents began to attend Mass privately at the home of the ambassador of Spain.
The Catholics of New York made a formal request to the Common Council of New York City for a suitable piece of land which the Catholic congregation could lease as the site for its church. The Protestant Corporation of Trinity Church, stated that three lots belonging to “the Farm of Trinity Church” permitted several leases to be transferred to the trustees of Saint Peter’s Church.
The Catholic congregation eventually leased five lots from Trinity Church at the corner of Barclay and Church streets. The cornerstone was laid on October 5, 1785. In the cornerstone are Spanish coins minted during the reign of King Charles III of Spain.
By the Spring of 1786, with the help of donations such as one thousand silver dollars from King Charles III of Spain, the congregation had collected enough money to begin construction. On November 4, 1786, a Solemn High Mass was offered in the new church. The first pastor needed to know six languages spoken by the eclectic congregation, namely English, French, Dutch (i.e. German), Spanish, Portuguese and Irish.
Saint Peter’s struggled in the beginning, and in 1792, the Corporation of Trinity Church voted to cancel part of the back rent which St Peter’s owed. Three years later, with St Peter’s still in debt, Trinity Church again came to the aid of the struggling parish when it cancelled back rents and transferred ownership of the land to the trustees of St Peter’s for the sum of one thousand pounds.
Despite the large growth of the congregation in the 1830’s, the neighborhood was changing from a residential to a business district. Homes gave way to stores, and stores to tall office buildings. The ethnic background of the parishioners reflected changing patterns of immigration. The congregation of St. Peter’s, in the 1830s consisted of some 25,000 souls, most of them Irish. The congregation gradually dwindled to 7,000 of twenty nationalities, most of them Polish Ruthenian.”
Then, after the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center, both St Peter’s and her chapel, St Joseph’s in Battery Park City, were used as staging grounds for rescue and recovery operations. “We were the first place they were bringing all the emergency equipment. Everything was in disarray,” then-pastor Kevin Madigan stated. “Supplies were piled six feet high all over the pews, bandages, gas masks, boots, hoses and cans of food for the workers and the volunteers, many of whom were sleeping in the pews on bedrolls.” The Church celebrated Masses occasionally, but only for the rescue workers and those few others with credentials to enter the area. The world-recognized World Trade Center Cross, a sign of hope for all the world to see in the wreckage of the buildings, was displayed outside St Peter’s on Church Street until it was moved to the 9/11 Memorial. A new custom cross, commissioned to stand in its place, was installed on August 11, 2011 to represent the resurrection of the neighborhood.