• Email Link
• Facebook
• Twitter
• Digg

Trinity head verger David Jette is used to giving tours of Trinity Church. A trained historian, Jette has spent years learning everything he can about the building and the history of the parish. All that experience came in handy recently when Jette was suddenly confronted with a tour group of unusual proportions.

“I was asked to give a tour for a visiting choir,” Jette said, noting that average tours are usually 15-20 people. “Then I walked out into the church, and there were 175 people sitting there, waiting for a tour.”

The tour — which included a large group of teenagers from the visiting choir — went well, he said.

“The kids had questions about 9/11 and about the organ,” both of which are often on the minds of visitors to Trinity Wall Street.

Every year, millions of visitors make their way to Trinity Church and St. Paul’s Chapel and many of those folks have met David Jette. Now, visitors are meeting more of the Trinity family through a new volunteer Docents Program. Every weekday at 2pm, a staff or parishioner volunteer leads a tour of the church and churchyard.

“The Docents Program was created as a way to further Trinity’s hospitality toward the rest of the world,” said program coordinator Donna Presnell.

“It’s nice when you come into a place like this beautiful building to have people inside who want to talk to you,” said Jette, who helps train the new docents. “In my experience, New Yorkers actually like to help out visitors because we like to think we know more about New York than anyone else.”

The docents have also had the benefit of getting tour tips from Trinity staff member David Pavlick, who was a professional tour guide at Walt Disney World. Like all things in church, the docents can’t ever predict what kind of tour group they’ll get — children, amateur historians, or a disparate group of tourists from all over the world — and they’re learning to adapt their tours accordingly.

Tours of Trinity Church are also available by prior arrangement by contacting David
Jette at djette@trinitywallstreet.org or 212.602.0872.

Comments

Share Your Comments Below:

Your Name:

Comment:

Type the characters as seen:

Trinity Wall Street welcomes discussion in good faith, but does reserve the right to remove user-submitted content from this website, including material that is offensive, malicious, inappropriate, unattributed or misleadingly attributed.