Dr. James Cooper leads by example

As the rector and chief executive of New York City’s venerable Trinity Wall Street Church, Dr. James H. Cooper has overseen all aspects of the organization, from Trinity Church and St. Paul’s Chapel to St. Margaret’s House, since his appointment in 2004.

Cooper, who received his Master of Divinity and his Doctor of Ministry from the Virginia Theological Seminary, has a long and distinguished record of service which spans more than 30 years in the clergy.

Among his past accomplishments, Cooper helped to grow his parish in Ponte Vedra, Fla., from a membership of 700 to more than 5,500, and he founded a nonprofit to provide quality health care to the region’s aging population.

In addition, he helped provide growth money for new churches in Nigeria, Kenya and Spain while also establishing missions and other facilities in Tanzania, Bolivia, the Bahamas and Cuba.
As the current head of Trinity, Cooper has helped to carry on the church’s original mission to serve the poor and isolated. The church was established in 1697, predating the city of New York.
Cooper has worked tirelessly alongside groups including the Downtown Alliance, an organization that provides funding to house the homeless in lower Manhattan. The church also gave a leadership grant to the Downtown Alliance’s Back to Business grant program, which is focused on helping small businesses in Zone A and lower Manhattan recover from the effects of Hurricane Sandy.

In addition, Cooper helped to steer funding of $250,000 to the Robin Hood Foundation, supporting the transition of veterans returning from active duty in Afghanistan.

Other initiatives Cooper has lent his time and talent to include a Relief Bureau to counsel the sick and jobless, food pantries and soup kitchens at Trinity chapels around the city, global grant programs that award millions both abroad and to vital programs in New York as well as the massive relief effort and shelter the church provided to the rescue workers at Ground Zero after 9/11.
When the John Heuss House, a day shelter for the homeless, was forced to close several years ago, Cooper and the church responded by opening Charlotte’s Place, a drop-in and welcome center for all visitors to the community. Further, a brown-bag lunch program was started on the front steps of Trinity, which distributes hundreds of bag lunches each week to anyone in need.

Also of importance is Cooper’s skill as a financial manager, carefully managing Trinity’s Grants Program, which has funded more than $72 million in programs in some 85 countries around the world since 1972.

But of all his responsibilities, perhaps the most important is the management of Trinity Real Estate, which handles the parish’s 6 million square feet of commercial real estate in Lower Manhattan. The income generated from the church’s real estate holdings, which Trinity has held for more than 300 years, enables the organization to sustain and develop programs and ministries around the world.
Honored recently at a Manhattan awards ceremony, sponsored by the Federation of Manhattan Welfare Agencies, Cooper made some thoughtful remarks.

“We have great expectations of each other,” Cooper said. He noted that while Trinity has “wonderful ministries, grand programs and buildings,” they will ultimately be known “not by those ministries and programs or buildings; we will be known by the love we have for one another.”

He added that “love endures all things, and it is only love that never ends. God will make the path straight again, will rise up the valleys and take boulders and mountains and throw them into the sea. … We are part of it simply because we love one another.”

Cooper is also known in the interfaith community for the work he began shortly after his arrival to push for increased communication and understanding of differences that arose among persons of differing faiths after 9/11.

He continues to reach out to those who speak out about both economic and social injustices.

Douglas Keister started out as a photographer, but it wasn’t until nearly a decade ago that he married his profession with two of his passions: writing and cemeteries. To Keister, who has documented both foreign and domestic resting places from Scotland and Italy to Oakland and Dixieland, cemeteries are “pure environments, [they’re] extremely evocative.”

This year, Keister published his latest deceased-themed work, Stories in Stone New York: A Field Guide to New York City Cemeteries and their Residents. We picked Keister’s brain to come up with his picks for the best burial grounds below 14th Street.

Keister’s Digs for the Departed

Trinity Church

Located in Lower Manhattan, this leafy plot dates back to the late 1600s and its famous residents, of course, are a collection of distinguished Caucasian men. The notables laid to rest here include Alexander Hamilton; though never a president, Hamilton served as aide to President George Washington, was the first U.S. secretary of the treasury and founded the Bank of New York. Among the other points of interest at this cemetery is the headstone of 5-year-old Robert Churcher (1676-1681), said to be the oldest in the churchyard.

St. Paul’s Chapel

The St. Paul’s Chapel crowd might be less illustrious than Trinity’s, but the space is no less green and meditative. Publisher John Holt (1721-1784) and actor George Frederick Cooke (1756-1812) found a final home here.

St. Mark’s Church-in-the-Bowery

Despite a lack of headstones, this site is home to an underground burial vault that houses one of New York’s more famous founders: Petrus, or Peter, Stuyvesant. Stuyvesant served as the last director general of the Dutch colony of New Netherland, present-day New York. He converted the property into a family chapel in 1660. The crowd at the St. Mark’s crypt is a collection of political bigwigs, including Vice President Daniel Tompkins (1774-1825).

New York City Marble Cemetery

Not to be confused with the nearby New York Marble Cemetery (located at 41½ Second Ave.), this plot was started in 1831 and is comprised of a series of roughly 258 vaults. While the cemetery contains many impressive monuments to mark its crypts, the most famous person interred there was President James Monroe. Though his remains were eventually reburied in Virginia, a monument bearing his name still stands at the site.

Congregation Shearith Israel Cemeteries

While the location of the first Shearith Israel cemetery remains unknown, it is known that the congregation, mostly Jews of Spanish and Portuguese descent, was given a small piece of land in New Amsterdam in the mid-1600s for their dead. Their second burial site, used from 1805 to 1829, is still standing in Greenwich Village, though significantly smaller than its original acreage. Though the residents aren’t notable per se, the uniqueness of this plot makes it a destination.

The Trinity Churchyard in Lower Manhattan boasts one of Downtown’s more famous departed residents, Alexander Hamilton.
PHOTO BY DOUGLAS KEISTER