A chapel near ground zero was a relief center after 9/11. Now, an exhibit honors its victims.
NEW YORK (RNS) — In the months after 9/11, St. Paul’s Chapel, a small, undamaged church sitting 100 yards from where the Twin Towers once stood, quickly turned into a relief center for recovery workers. Known as the “Little Chapel That Stood,” the church kept its doors open 24/7 for nine months, providing food, prayers and support to responders in between shifts.
The Rev. Phillip A. Jackson, rector of Trinity Church, St. Paul’s parent Episcopal church, said the chapel’s disaster response was tied to its long history of supporting the Lower Manhattan community in times of trial.
“When 9/11 happened, it was in our neighborhood, and so we responded to that,” he told RNS last week. “The physical proximity, the scale of the disaster … it made us realize that this neighborhood is not just an abstraction, it’s our place … that we have a fundamental role in caring for it, in caring for its people.”
As word of the chapel’s aid spread beyond New York City, St. Paul’s received messages of peace and hope from all over the world. Among them were messages from a group of Hiroshima and Nagasaki atomic bombing survivors, who sent thousands of origami paper cranes to the church. The…
