Talk:Trinity Church on the Green

Orphaned references in Trinity Church on the Green

I check pages listed in Category:Pages with incorrect ref formatting to try to fix reference errors. One of the things I do is look for content for orphaned references in wikilinked articles. I have found content for some of Trinity Church on the Green's orphans, the problem is that I found more than one version. I can't determine which (if any) is correct for this article, so I am asking for a sentient editor to look it over and copy the correct ref content into this article.

Reference named "nhlsum":

• From American Legation, Tangier: "American Legation". National Historic Landmark summary listing. National Park Service. Archived from the original on 11 October 2007. Retrieved 2007-10-12. {{cite web}}: Unknown parameter |deadurl= ignored (|url-status= suggested) (help)
• From New Haven Green: "New Haven Green Historic District". National Historic Landmark summary listing. National Park Service. Retrieved 2007-10-03.

I apologize if any of the above are effectively identical; I am just a simple computer program, so I can't determine whether minor differences are significant or not. AnomieBOT⚡ 21:19, 30 October 2013 (UTC)

"Gothick style" and "box pews"

What is with the quoted "Gothick style" reference in the introduction? It's in quotes, so presumably it was taken from some old written record and is supposed to look quaint, but it doesn't give any hint as to who said it or what relevance it has. How does the reader know that its not just something that the editor made up and included in the article? I just don't see what it contributes; it's basically just inaccurate spelling unless there is some reason to include it. I was tempted to change it, but decided not to.

"Gothick" was put in to illustrate what the people of the day considered new, and is a direct quote by Bishop Abraham Jarvis (see the citation). There is a great deal of ink spent today on whether something is Gothic, Gothic revival, neo-Gothic, or Gothic survival, and the point was simply that people at the time thought it was Gothic, whatever architectural historians today claim. The historical spelling was used to reinforce the “people at the time” idea. It was Jarvis's own spelling. I’ll try to clarify this with additional text.--Harrycroswell (talk) 11:05, 1 November 2015 (UTC)

Next, it claims twice in the article that the church has "box pews". Those are not box pews. They are normal, full length pews, that happen to have doors on the end. That does not a box pew make. Almost all box pews are square or rectangular, and feature seating around all four sides, so you sit facing each other (and some of the people have to sit facing away from the priest/minister/preacher, if the pew is full). They are sized for a family sized unit, so even in the rare case when box pews are made in aisles, with seats all facing the front, they are still divided into small units that are rented out or sold to raise money. Renting out a whole row of pews per family would not be very efficient, since most families wouldn't come close to filling a whole row. I suspect that the church was originally built with box pews, but they were replaced with normal pews (pews with doors, another thing you see in quite a few old churches) during one of the later renovations. It is possible that it was originally built with row pews, except with dividers breaking the rows up into smaller boxes, and that they simply removed the dividers later during the renovation and left the aisle doors intact, but it would seem unlikely for a New England church built during that era to have row pews, since the square "box" pew was almost universal at that time. So even if you wanted to insist that those are "box pews" because they have doors, it is very unlikely that they are the original pews..45Colt 20:30, 31 October 2015 (UTC)

A very interesting point, though the article describes “pews boxes”, not “box pews”. Pews have been and are still a major point of contention in churches, with the trend now being to replace them with movable chairs, at the cost of “historical vandalism”, some say. The pews at Trinity with latchable doors are considered unusual by visitors, so need some explanation. Neither of the two contemporary 1812-1814 churches on the Green in New Haven have them. I’ve seen the “box pews” you mention – St. Peter’s in Philadelphia being an example - and Trinity was clearly NOT an attempt to make such square people-facing-people high walled pews of the Colonial Era.

But Trinity’s pews were indeed sold (and later rented) to Family’s. The records of these deeds and the pew assignments are available at the New Haven Museum. The parish records show they appointed a “clerk” to collect pew rentals, and they hired an “auctioneer” to sell pews. Ithiel Town and the vestry of 1812 were inventing a new form of architecture, but not, apparently, a new form of church seating.

Note that the Wikipedia article on “box pews” is more open that your assertion of what is a box pew. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Box_pew. The image of some of the pews are rectangular “people facing pulpit” not square “people facing people”. A “Google images” of “box pew” shows about a 50/50 split. The article seems to imply that any closed pew is a box pew.

Perhaps “closed door, pulpit facing, latchable box pews” might be a better way to describe the pews instead of simply “box pews”? The church was not heated by iron stoves until years after it was built – though it was the first church in New Haven to have heating – so perhaps another reason for the boxing, as some commentators state, was to reduce drafts. However, according to records, seating was indeed by family, and by how important a member was; the pews closest to the pulpit were for the best people.

I’ll address the concern by changing “pew boxes” to “box pews with latchable doors on the pulpit-facing slips in the nave (though not the galleries)" and note that they "were already archaic in 1816, but reflect this early method of raising income."--Harrycroswell (talk) 11:05, 1 November 2015 (UTC)

United Society

notes this church prominently in its own article but passes unmentioned here. If there is a connection, it bears linking and possibly some short gloss. — LlywelynII 15:32, 27 July 2016 (UTC)

A good point. I'll add some text on how the SPG funded the parish from 1723 to 1780.Harrycroswell (talk) 22:42, 27 July 2016 (UTC)