- end_line
- 11797
- extracted_at
- 2026-01-30T20:48:52.924Z
- extracted_by
- structure-extraction-lambda
- start_line
- 11744
- text
- I.
In the lower old-fashioned part of the city, in a narrow street--almost
a lane--once filled with demure-looking dwellings, but now chiefly with
immense lofty warehouses of foreign importers; and not far from the
corner where the lane intersected with a very considerable but
contracted thoroughfare for merchants and their clerks, and their carmen
and porters; stood at this period a rather singular and ancient edifice,
a relic of the more primitive time. The material was a grayish stone,
rudely cut and masoned into walls of surprising thickness and strength;
along two of which walls--the side ones--were distributed as many rows
of arched and stately windows. A capacious, square, and wholly
unornamented tower rose in front to twice the height of the body of the
church; three sides of this tower were pierced with small and narrow
apertures. Thus far, in its external aspect, the building--now more than
a century old,--sufficiently attested for what purpose it had originally
been founded. In its rear, was a large and lofty plain brick structure,
with its front to the rearward street, but its back presented to the
back of the church, leaving a small, flagged, and quadrangular vacancy
between. At the sides of this quadrangle, three stories of homely brick
colonnades afforded covered communication between the ancient church,
and its less elderly adjunct. A dismantled, rusted, and forlorn old
railing of iron fencing in a small courtyard in front of the rearward
building, seemed to hint, that the latter had usurped an unoccupied
space formerly sacred as the old church's burial inclosure. Such a fancy
would have been entirely true. Built when that part of the city was
devoted to private residences, and not to warehouses and offices as now,
the old Church of the Apostles had had its days of sanctification and
grace; but the tide of change and progress had rolled clean through its
broad-aisle and side-aisles, and swept by far the greater part of its
congregation two or three miles up town. Some stubborn and elderly old
merchants and accountants, lingered awhile among its dusty pews,
listening to the exhortations of a faithful old pastor, who, sticking to
his post in this flight of his congregation, still propped his
half-palsied form in the worm-eaten pulpit, and occasionally
pounded--though now with less vigorous hand--the moth-eaten covering of
its desk. But it came to pass, that this good old clergyman died; and
when the gray-headed and bald-headed remaining merchants and accountants
followed his coffin out of the broad-aisle to see it reverently
interred; then that was the last time that ever the old edifice
witnessed the departure of a regular worshiping assembly from its walls.
The venerable merchants and accountants held a meeting, at which it was
finally decided, that, hard and unwelcome as the necessity might be, yet
it was now no use to disguise the fact, that the building could no
longer be efficiently devoted to its primitive purpose. It must be
divided into stores; cut into offices; and given for a roost to the
gregarious lawyers. This intention was executed, even to the making
offices high up in the tower; and so well did the thing succeed, that
ultimately the church-yard was invaded for a supplemental edifice,
likewise to be promiscuously rented to the legal crowd. But this new
building very much exceeded the body of the church in height. It was
some seven stories; a fearful pile of Titanic bricks, lifting its tiled
roof almost to a level with the top of the sacred tower.
- title
- Chunk 1