St. PaulÂ’s Chapel: Living Hope
If you pay a visit to Ground Zero, site of what was once the World Trade Center, you’ll notice how the gaping desolate hole, now a massive construction site filled with enormous cranes is strikingly juxtaposed with the leafy green burial ground and majestic St. Paul’s Chapel directly across the street. Built in 1766, St. Paul’s Chapel is Manhattan’s only remaining colonial church and the oldest public building in continuous use. After the September 11, 2001 attacks, St. Paul’s Chapel served as a place of rest and refuge for recovery workers at the WTC site.
For eight months, hundreds of volunteers worked 12 hour shifts around the clock, serving meals, making beds, counseling and praying with fire fighters, construction workers, police and others. Massage therapists, chiropractors, podiatrists and musicians also tended to their needs. Inside the chapel, an interactive exhibit, "Unwavering Spirit: Hope & Healing at Ground Zero", continues to serve as a shrine of this catastrophe, focusing on individuals involved and their personal stories
On that fateful day, the collapsing towers sent tons of debris hurdling toward the church, including a large steel beam from the North Tower knocking over a giant sycamore tree that had stood for nearly a century in the church yard. When the dust settled, the uprooted tree had miraculously fallen in such a way that none of the historic tombstones around it were disturbed, none of the wreckage reached the church, and not a single pane of glass was broken. Today, the stump is all that remains.
In 2005, renowned sculpture Steve Tobin, hearing the story of this sycamore, envisioned creating a metaphor of unity and strength using the tree’s roots in a bronze sculpture. Tobin with the help of tree experts, first painstakingly preserved the original Sycamore stump which is now on display outside the Chapel, and then created the massive sculpture based on castings of the tree’s roots. Called the "Trinity Root", it is on display in the plaza of Trinity Church, located five blocks south at Broadway and Wall St.
More information on PlanetEye: St. Paul’s Chapel
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