For the trials on these indictments, which will open to-morrow, the issue is clearly drawn. It is a struggle between organized lawlessness and the forces of order.
The proposed destruction of an historic landmark
recorded in a news story and subsequently made prominent
by protests against the action, furnished a reporter
on the New York Evening Post with an occasion for
the following article, in which he blends suggestive description,
emotional coloring, and historical background
into an harmonious whole:
Mellow notes from an old organ filled the nave of St.
John's Chapel, on Varick Street, to-day. It was Stainer's
"Nunc Dimittis in A" that the organist was playing. Somehow
it seemed peculiarly appropriate, for, as every one
knows, they are going to discontinue the work of this chapel,
which has stood for more than a hundred years. This means
that, unless present plans are abandoned, the stately church
will be sold within a very short time, and then razed to make
place for factory or office building.
There is little doubt that this will occur, although Trinity Corporation has received numerous protests from those to whom the place of worship has meant much, who still regard it as one of the few links connecting them with things that are gone. The corporation cannot see its way clear to provide for a chapel officially regarded as unnecessary. And yet old St. John's, with its towering brown spire, its richly colored stones, its heavy columns, and chipped, time-stained façade—a replica of old St. Martin's in the Fields, of London—stands benignly, bearing its past with a genuine dignity.
The peal of the organ ebbed and flowed over the pews with their faded crimson cushions. In one of them sat the priest in charge, listening, very young; until he talked of the church he loved, he seemed strangely apart from the all-pervading atmosphere of things that were old.
Near by was an earnest woman in the garb of the Episcopal sisterhood, and the under-sexton had paused in his work about the pews. When St. John's organist is at the keys, the roar of the street is repulsed. The rumble of freight cars, the shouts of the handlers of merchandise, the beat of horses' hoofs enter but gently, mere suggestions of outer confusion.
