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President George W. Bush has joined his father, and one of the founding fathers, in the list of U.S. leaders to visit St. Paul’s Chapel.

The President took part in a service marking the fifth anniversary of the 9/11 attacks on September 10. The service was attended by the President and Mrs. Bush, as well as family members of those who died on 9/11. New York Governor George Pataki was in attendance, as were Senators Charles Schumer and Hillary Clinton, and Mayor Michael Bloomberg and his predecessor, Rudolph Giuliani.

President Bush was the third U.S. President to visit St. Paul’s. As it happens, he is also the third president named George to do so. The first was George Washington, who made St. Paul’s his church home when the capitol of the U.S. was New York City.

Washington’s most famous visit to St. Paul’s occurred just after his first inauguration, when he proceeded from Federal Hall north on Broadway to St. Paul’s in order to give thanks.

Trinity’s archivist, Gwynedd Cannan, notes that Washington would have gone to Trinity Church, the “mother church” of St. Paul’s, but that Trinity was being rebuilt at the time (it had been destroyed in the Great Fire of 1766).

Since then, the parish has celebrated the inauguration’s centennial anniversaries. The second presidential visit came 200 years later, when President George H.W. Bush marked that anniversary of Washington’s inauguration.

St. Paul’s was built in 1766. For nine months after the attacks on the World Trade Center, it was the center of a relief ministry for ground-zero’s workers. Thousands of volunteers and hundreds of rescue workers passed through St. Paul’s, and the chapel became known around the world as “the little chapel that stood.”