“The Little Church Around the Corner,” The Civil War, and The Draft Riots

Rev. Dr. George Hendric Houghton was a follower of the Oxford Movement, which tried to move the Anglican churches towards a more Catholic approach to the liturgy as well as focusing on good works as a path towards redemption. Churches from this movement tended to follow pre-Reformation lines of Anglo-Catholicism.

Rev. Houghton wanted an elaborate and highly decorated church to lift his parishioners thoughts to God, but he was contented to sleep for many years on a cot he set up at night in the church.

Construction of the church began in 1849 and was completed in 1864. Father Houghton was not happy with the location. He wanted to work with the poorest of the poor and 29th St. and Fifth Ave. were many blocks from the immigrant neighborhoods. He became even more upset about the site chosen by his board of directors as the neighborhood gentrified in the decade and a half during which it was being built.

Lest you think this is a bucolic country setting, that is the Empire State Building rising in the center of the picture. It is just three blocks away.

The church, when finished in 1864, was large enough for 1,000 people. Work continued for forty more years on a number of support buildings, including the litch, an outdoor structure where caskets were set before entering the church for funerals.

In the years immediately before the Civil War, the church sheltered runaway slaves. Unlike many Episcopal priests who stayed neutral on the issue, Houghton was an abolitionist.

When the Civil War broke out, Houghton became the unpaid chaplain of a soldiers’ hospital. This must have reminded him of his youth. As a theology student he had volunteered working with paupers at Bellevue Hospital.

The Little Church is one of the most peaceful spots in Midtown. I stopped there seven years ago to eat my sandwich amidst its flowers and fountain. In 1863, though this church yard was filling with African Americans fleeing the neighborhoods they shared with Irish immigrants at the start of the Draft Riots.

A Black church nearby had already been burned when a mob of hundreds arrived at the spot this photo has taken at looking for new targets.

The church’s history records what happened next:

Warned by the police that they
would not and could not protect him from the mob should they attack
the Church, Dr. Houghton refused
to surrender the refugees to the mob. When the
mob did appear at the church Dr. Houghton lost his
temper. He shook his fist at them and shouted:
“You white devils, you!
Do you know nothing of the
spirit of Christ?”

Whether it was his moral indignation. or the fact that he had a reputation of helping the poor, the rioters left the church and its refugees unharmed. They sheltered with Fr. Houghton in the church.

And in the chapel, which in the early 1850s had served as the parish’s school for boys. I participated in the midday service there that lovely day.

Fr. Houghton was memorialized after his death, although no mention was made of his courage in July, 1863.

The interior contains beautiful leaded windows, stained glass, and hand carved wood statues and reliefs:

In spite of Houghton’s anger at the immigrant rioters, in 1864 he established a bread line for the poor in the neighborhood that lasted for the rest of the war. The church set up a breadline again during the Great Depression.

The church got its nickname in 1870 out of an incident related to its final connections to the Civil War. Here is Wikipedia’s version, which is the one I grew up with as well:

Actors were among the social outcasts whom Dr. Houghton befriended. In 1870, William T. Sabine, the rector of the nearby Church of the Atonement, which is no longer extant, refused to conduct funeral services for an actor named George Holland, suggesting, “I believe there is a little church around the corner where they do that sort of thing.” Joseph Jefferson, a fellow actor who was trying to arrange Holland’s burial, exclaimed, “If that be so, God bless the little church around the corner!”

P.G. Wodehouse was married here. In the late 19th Century and early 20th, the church became a favorite place for marriages and it drew criticism for marrying non-parishioners who enjoyed its doctrinal conservativism and political liberalism. Someone wrote that it was such a place for lovers that many a life began from marriages entered into here.

The Jerome Kern musical “Sally” referred to Vegas wedding chapel reputation of the church in a song with the line:

“Dear little, dear little Church ‘Round the Corner / Where so many lives have begun, / Where folks without money see nothing that’s funny / In two living cheaper than one.”

The final connection to the Civil War is this: John Wilkes Booth’s brother Edwin had his funeral at the Little Church. There is a stained glass window in the church of Edwin in his Hamlet costume.

Here is the plaque on 5th Ave and 29th St.