With the coming of Theodore Cuyler a new era opened up for the old
Market Street church. Two years before Dr. Cuyler had spoken at a large
temperance meeting in Tripler Hall, together with General Houston, Henry
Ward Beecher, Horace Mann and other celebrities. It was his first public
address in a city that was to know much of him.
In 1853 Mr. Cuyler was called and installed by the South Classis of New
York, November 13, 1853. He says that while walking along Henry Street
Judge Hoxie said to Mr. Lyles: "If our young brother will come and work
in the Market Street church we might do something yet."
Cuyler lived at Pike and Madison Streets and later in Rutgers Street.
His salary was $1,500, advanced later to $2,500. The church building was
painted, and in 1855 a new roof was put on at the expense of the
pewholders.
Opposite the church on the northeast corner was a large and select
private school. At 11 Market Street later was a smaller one, headed by
a German patriot, whose son-in-law was one of the great generals during
the Rebellion.
In his address in the church at the Eightieth Anniversary, Dr. Cuyler
called it "fighting the adversary of souls and geography," for even in
Dr. Ferris's time there were indications of waning strength because of
"the continued emigration of the more substantial class of church
members from the down-town districts of the city uptown."
[Illustration: Cuyler at Market Street]
But the indefatigable Cuyler postponed the evil day, and for seven years
of intensest activity he remained in Market Street.
To quote Dr. Cuyler: "I looked around me and saw there were a good many
substantial families that could support a church and East Broadway
swarmed with young men."
"Here was the lord of the manor, the nephew of Colonel Rutgers, Wm. B.
Crosby. What a devoted Christian he was. His good old gray head moved up
to the pew every Sunday, rain or shine. There was a deacons' pew, and in
the center sat the best-known man in New York, Judge Joseph Hoxie. When
we said the creed and nobody joined he shouted it, and in song his voice
was heard above the choir. There sat Jacob Westervelt, the mayor of New
York, and he boasted that he was the only member of the Dutch Church who
could read a Dutch Bible."
[Illustration: Theodore Ledyard Cuyler]
The galleries were packed with young men. One, a young Irish boy,
Robert McBurney, became the great secretary of the Young Men's Christian
Association. Charles Briggs was another young member, and around him
later raged the bitterest theological controversy of the century.
During the summer of 1854 the service was changed to 4 P. M., 7:30 being
resumed in September.
In 1855 the seats in the gallery were changed from four rows to three
rows, and the infant school was held in the "scholars' gallery" of the
church. The low seats are still in the second gallery.
A stove was put in, too, as the heating was not satisfactory.
In 1855, A. D. Stowell came as Bible class teacher at a salary of $12
per month.
Dr. Cuyler rightly referred to it as a busy old hive, for from Market
Street church emanated some of the greatest religious movements of the
century.
Howard Crosby, son of William B. Crosby, and brought up in the Market
Street church, was the first president of the Young Men's Christian
Association. Cuyler became interested in it the second year of its
existence in New York, and during his long lifetime he never ceased to
work for it. But if the church had done nought else than bring Robert
McBurney to the Association it would have been amply repaid. The master
spirit in the Association for thirty years McBurney's name is written
in golden letters in the city's history. Morris K. Jesup and William
E. Dodge, life-long friends of the church, were early Association
supporters.
A work typical of Market Street church was the Fulton Street
prayer-meeting, started by Jeremiah C. Lamphier, who sang in the church
choir. Dr. Cuyler credits this with being the first move in the tremendous
revival that from 1856 to 1858 swayed the city, and went on to other
cities, gathering momentum. Cuyler says: "In three or four weeks the
revival so absorbed the city that business men crowded into the churches
from 12 to 3 each day, and when Horace Greeley was asked to start a new
philanthropic enterprise he said: 'The city is so absorbed with this
revival that it has no time for anything else.'"
Market Street church gathered in 150 new members, and 1859 was one of
the glorious ones in the history of the church.
Mr. Lamphier died December 26, 1898.
In the Temperance cause, Dr. Cuyler was also a ceaseless worker. From
1851 to 1857 he was in close alliance with Neal Dow, then at the height
of his fame as a prohibition advocate.
Another organization that had an earnest supporter in Dr. Cuyler was
the Christian Endeavor Society, tho Cuyler gives all the credit for its
fatherhood to Rev. F. E. Clarke.
In a day when such things were not common Market Street church got
deeply into matters civic. "The most hideous sink of iniquity and
loathsome degradation was in the then famous Five Points," Baxter,
Worth, Mulberry, Park Streets, not far from the church. An old building,
honeycombed with vaults and secret passages, called the Old Brewery, was
the center of a locality that boldly flouted the police. Indeed, for
years the Old Brewery was a harbor of refuge for any criminal, for the
law never reached him there, nor were the Five Points ever a safe place
to walk thru. At night no one dared be seen there. For some years the
Five Points had played a physical part in the elections, and many a riot
had its inception there.
Then the city put thru Worth Street, formerly known as Anthony Street,
after a Rutgers, and the Old Brewery Mission was establisht there. Thru
Mrs. Pease, a member of the Market Street church, whose husband was the
brave projector of the Five Points House of Industry, the church became
interested in improving conditions. When Mr. Pease went south, his place
was taken by Benjamin R. Barlow, one of the Market Street elders.
In his autobiography, Dr. Cuyler tells how he "used to make nocturnal
explorations of some of those satanic quarters" to keep public interest
awake in the mission work at the Five Points. New Yorkers who remember
the House of Industry of thirty years ago and who now look at Mulberry
Bend Park may well thank the old Market Street church that the Cow Bay,
Bandit's Roost, the Old Brewery and Cut Throat Alley are things of the
past, and that the Five Points are known to this later day only as a
name. No second Charles Dickens will cross the ocean to tell us that
"all that is loathsome, drooping and decayed is here."
[Illustration]
Few men have been in touch with so many public movements as Dr. Cuyler.
He was the personal friend of statesmen, churchmen, professors,
lecturers, teachers, philanthropists, diplomats, poets and presidents.
And as was the minister so were the people of the Market Street church:
forward in every movement for the betterment of mankind, the coming of
the kingdom. Some of the best families of New York were connected there,
and as fathers bought pews for the sons when they married it was a
family church. These names are frequent: Duryee, Crosby, Mersereau,
Brinkerhoff, Poillon, Zophar Mills, Ludlam, Suydam, Westervelt, Waydell,
Chittenden, Bartlett, McKee, Purdy and a host of others.
Small wonder that from among men like these great institutions should
come, that the Park Bank and the Nassau Bank should be founded by Market
Street church men. The annual pew rents were $5,000, then a large sum.
Perhaps it was their very farsightedness that made the people of the
church think of moving uptown. The "brownstone front" was drawing people
northward, and Dr. Cuyler started a movement "to erect a new edifice
on Murray Hill, and to retain the old building in Market Street as an
auxiliary mission chapel." Subscriptions were secured, William E. Dodge
heading the list. But the new site at Park Avenue and Thirty-fifth
Street did not find favor, and many were opposed to the whole project,
so when in 1860 the consistory was to vote the first payment, the whole
enterprise failed by one vote.
Dr. Cuyler said he would thank the good old man who cast that
vote--Meade was his name--if he ever met him in the other world. He
resigned from Market Street church, his ministry ending April 7, 1860,
and accepted a call from the little Lafayette Avenue Presbyterian Church
in Brooklyn. His friend, Henry Ward Beecher, did not see how he could
get a congregation there, but after many years of ever-increasing
usefulness Mr. Beecher lived to say to Dr. Cuyler: "You are now in the
center, and I am out on the circumference."
It was strange that a man of the forceful type of Cuyler should leave
a church because it would not move away, and that thirty years later he
should preach in it, rejoicing in its continuing prosperity. Strange,
too, that Cuyler left the Dutch Church for the Presbyterian, and that
the old building "changed its faith" in like manner.
Rev. Chauncey D. Murray was the next pastor of the Market Street church,
the classis installing him March 10, 1861, and he was succeeded in 1863
by Rev. Jacob C. Dutcher. William B. Crosby, of beloved memory, came
forward with very liberal contributions to sustain the church, but the
depletion went on. In Mr. Murray's time another attempt to move uptown
had failed.
In December, 1859, the courts had already given permission for a sale,
but on condition that another church be built uptown with the proceeds.
This having failed, under a revised order of the court the building was
deeded to Hanson K. Corning in 1866, another congregation having
meanwhile inaugurated services there.
The old consistory lived on till June 2, 1869, when it held its last
meeting at the home of R. R. Crosby, in Twenty-second Street. A committee
had secured the necessary legal modifications so that the temporalities
could be disposed of. The distribution was as follows:
To St. Paul's Reformed church on Twenty-first Street, $15,000; $8,000
to the Prospect Hill Reformed church on Eighty-fifth Street, and about
$18,000 to the Northwest Reformed church on Twenty-third Street. A $500
United States bond was given by William B. Crosby to the Sunday school
of the Twenty-first Street church. The baptismal font was presented to
St. Paul's church, the splendid communion service to the Prospect Hill
church. All these churches have past out of existence. The organ was
presented to the Church of the Sea and Land; "the property right in the
Henry Rutgers tablet was given to R. R. Crosby; the McMurray tablet to
Henry Rutgers McMurray. A vault in Twenty-second Street was given to the
Prospect Hill church. The bell, now loaned to the Church of the Sea and
Land, was given in a revisionary right to the consistory of the
Collegiate church, in case it ever ceases to ring for a Protestant
church." It still rings undisturbed, tho it has not in the memory of man
swung on its wheel. Only recently has it been given back one of its
earliest powers: it is to ring the alarum if all modern means fail. It
was cast in Troy in 1847, and the committee (Crosby, Conover and Lyles)
spent $365.14 for it. The congregation thought too much of it in 1848 to
allow its use by Engine Company 42 for fire alarms. The books of the
Market Street church were left to the Collegiate church and are now at
New Brunswick.
[Illustration]
All this having been done, the president of the consistory, Mahlon T.
Hewitt, handed out the remaining letters of dismissal to D. W. Woodford,
Robert R. Crosby, William Lain, Dr. Veranus Morse, John Van Flick, Henry
Taylor and Albert I. Lyon, and made a formal closing address in which he
offered "a sincere prayer that its old walls may still stand, and that
it may continue to be the birthplace of souls into the kingdom of
Christ." The prayer has been answered.
Thus ended the Protestant Reformed Dutch church in Market Street after
just fifty years.