St. Patrick's Old Cathedral

This is not the famous St. Patrick's. The famous one is on Fifth Avenue. This is the original — built between eighteen oh nine and eighteen fifteen in the Gothic Revival style on Mulberry Street in what is now Nolita, at the edge of Little Italy. It was the first cathedral in New York, and when the bishop's chair moved uptown in eighteen seventy-nine, this building was quietly forgotten.

Beneath it are catacombs. Thirty-five family crypts and five clerical vaults, constructed between eighteen oh nine and eighteen fifteen because Manhattan was running out of burial space. The catacombs contain original Thomas Edison light fixtures and tilework by Rafael Guastavino — the same tiler responsible for the arches in Grand Central's Whispering Gallery.

For over two hundred years, almost nobody saw the catacombs. They were restricted to clergy and the families of the entombed. In twenty seventeen, the basilica opened them to the public for candlelight tours.

Among those buried here: the first resident Bishop of New York John Connolly, members of the Delmonico restaurant family, and Congressman John Kelly. The churchyard above, surrounded by a high brick wall, feels like a different century — one of the quietest spots in Lower Manhattan.