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 begun in 1803, and completed nine years later. The likelihood of the city's extending beyond it seemed too slight to warrant lavishing upon its back the white marble which adds so much to the dignity and grace of its façade; the rear wall was accordingly constructed of a cheaper stone. In the "Governor's room" on the second floor, used for official receptions, are the desk on which Washington wrote his first message to Congress, the chair in which he was inaugurated as President, and the chairs used by the first federal Congress.

In the same neighborhood, just beyond the lower extremity of the old Common, now City Hall Park, stands St. Paul's Chapel, Trinity parish—an edifice much older than the parish church, which for the past half-century, like its successive parent buildings, has stood farther down Broadway, opposing its bulk to the westward progress of Wall Street. Fenced off by iron palings, and bordered on each side by a strip of graveyard, the chapel turns a picturesque and perhaps scornful back upon the "topless towers" of Broadway—little dreamt of when its foundations were laid in 1766, or three-and-twenty years later, when President Washington attended service