A small group of Anglicans in colonial New York petitioned the royal governor for their own parish in 1696, and King William III granted the charter the following year, establishing Trinity Church at the head of Wall Street facing the Hudson River. The parish's fortunes changed in 1705, when Queen Anne and Lord Cornbury granted it a tract of land known as the King's Farm, sixty two acres that, as the city grew around it over two centuries, became some of the most valuable real estate in the world.
The building itself has not survived intact from that founding. The original 1698 church burned in the fire that swept New York during the British occupation in September 1776, and its 1790 replacement stood until heavy snows in the winter of 1838 and 1839 weakened its structure enough that the vestry ordered it demolished. The third and current building, designed by Richard Upjohn in a closely researched Gothic Revival style, was consecrated on Ascension Day, May 21, 1846. Its two hundred eighty one foot steeple made it the tallest structure in New York City for over forty years.
Trinity's colonial land grant proved its most consequential inheritance. The parish divested large portions of the King's Farm over the centuries, including land that became part of Columbia University, while retaining enough Manhattan property that its endowment today ranks among the largest of any religious institution in the country, funding music, education and outreach far beyond an ordinary parish's means.
The church stood directly in the path of the September 11, 2001 attacks, barely a block from the World Trade Center; it survived with only minor damage, and its dependent St. Paul's Chapel became a round the clock relief center for recovery workers afterward.