This brownstone was once the tallest structure in North America, and your eyes can still find its spire. Trinity Church has occupied this corner since 1698, though fire and structural failure brought down two earlier buildings; the Gothic Revival brownstone before you was completed in 1846. Its 281-foot spire dominated the Manhattan skyline for decades, visible from ships entering the harbor, until the first true skyscrapers began to overtake it in the 1890s.
The churchyard beside it is one of the oldest cemeteries in New York, crowded with history: Alexander Hamilton, the first Secretary of the Treasury and founder of the Bank of New York, is buried here, killed in a duel with Aaron Burr in 1804. Robert Fulton, the inventor of the commercial steamboat, is buried here too, and so are other founders and merchants who built this city. Push through the iron gate into the churchyard and find Hamilton's white marble tomb; it sits in the shadow of the towers his financial system helped build.