8,000 pipes and a decade in the making: Manhattan’s Trinity Church has a new organ

An iconic Manhattan church has completed the monumental feat that is replacing a pipe organ.

“It’s a rare, once-in-a-lifetime thing that you see those size organ pipes being installed in a space like Trinity Church,” said Melissa Attebury, music director of the more than 300-year-old Wall Street parish.

Many have and will continue to experience this mortal plane without ever witnessing the sight that is a pipe organ’s giant console crossing Broadway by forklift, or its 32-foot-long wooden pipes being wheeled through the Financial District on dollies and then carefully hoisted into place via a custom gantry while strapped to an aluminum truss.

Those are just the final steps. Trinity’s sparkling new pipe organ took a decade to plan and produce.

“Organs are basically the sonic equivalent of a building,” said Avi Stein, the landmarked church’s current associate organist and chorusmaster. “And, like any old building, at some point things need renovation or reconstruction.”

Several other Manhattan churches have also recently replaced their old organs, including Holy Trinity Lutheran Church on West 65th Street (in 2023), Midtown’s St. Thomas Church (in 2018) and the Church of the Ascension just north of Washington Square Park (in 2011). St. John the Divine’s pipe organ was restored late last year and the pipe organ at St. Patrick’s Cathedral is currently being rebuilt, with an anticipated return of spring 2027.

“New York actually has managed to get a little bit of an organ renaissance in the last few decades,” Stein said, calling it something of “a mini golden age of organ-building.”

This hardly compares to organ-building’s peak around the beginning of the 20th century, when there was enough demand to merit organ-producing factories across the country, he said. But he said the faith community may be seeking out more organic and authentic experiences — a reaction to mass production similar to the craft beer movement or vinyl’s resurgence.

Commissioning a product from an artisan industry, however, is much more involved than ordering something that’s been mass-produced, and Trinity has been on a slow journey to getting a new organ since its already aging, 5,000-pipe Aeolian Skinner was damaged by debris in the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. The church’s St. Paul’s Chapel famously became a refuge following 9/11, as it stood largely undamaged after the World Trade Center’s collapse.

“The dust was so pervasive throughout the instrument, so pervasive throughout the building, I mean, my office, everything. Everything was covered — everything,” Owen Burdick, Trinity’s music director at the time, recalled on “All Things Considered” in 2016, shortly after the instrument was at last reconsecrated.

The replacement process started with a road trip of sorts in 2015.

“We ran around the country playing 30-odd instruments by various North American makers, to decide who we wanted to engage,” said Stein.

The church finally settled on commissioning longtime collaborators Glatter-Götz, a German builder, and tonal designer Manuel Rosales, best known for their dramatic Walt Disney Concert Hall organ, or “French fries.”

After a time, production got underway: Most of the manufacturing happened in Germany, although some parts were made in Portugal and others in Ohio. Most of the pipes eventually went to Los Angeles for an acoustical preparation called “pre-voicing” before being driven to New York, where the hundreds of thousands of individual parts, including 8,041 pipes, were finally united in Trinity’s gallery this June.

Stein estimated this is Trinity’s 10th organ, depending on how you count it. The church currently has two other less grand ones on its campus.

The church has planned an organ-oriented musical programming series to celebrate its new organ.

The series, called “PIPES,” has various concerts so as to separately showcase all the new Glatter-Götz/Rosales organ’s myriad facets.

Attebury said she’s particularly excited for Trinity’s most recent congregants to hear it.

“We have a lot of new people coming to church, especially since the pandemic. They’ve never heard a grand pipe organ in this space,” she said.

Although the electronic organ employed as an interim solution since 9/11 has sufficed, it’s simply not the same as the real thing.

“It’s more than a single instrument,” said Melissa Baker, Trinity’s director of artistic planning. “It’s an orchestra unto itself, a resonant voice of the city that speaks to the past, present and future.”