St Thomas's church, an oasis of Englishness on Fifth Avenue, has just helped me empathize with all the Ukrainians, Irish and other New York ethnicities who flock somewhere each Sunday for that feeling of being connected with home.
Each weekend morning in the East Village I would head out in search of borscht, blintzes and other tastes of East European cooking. Why? Because it's available, it's home-made the way the chef's grandmother made it, and therefore it tastes amazing.
In the same spirit, the Ukrainians in my neighborhood have built a spectacular orthodox church with vivid murals and gold ornaments. The Greeks have their churches out in Astoria, there are splendid Hindu temples in Flushing, and Queens has every flavor of religious service you could hope for - at least as authentic as back home.
It turns out that my little piece of cultural turf in the city is right here: squatting on some of earth's most expensive real estate just a few blocks south of the park. Sitting on heavy wooden pews, you take out the little knee-pad thing, pick up the order of service with helpful call-and-response prompts (the Lord Be With You ... And Also With You) and flick through the numbered hymn book.
The vicar has a good strong Home Counties accent, the services have names like Festal Eucharist that are slightly indecipherable but rather attractive (like the services themselves), and there is that familiar smell - the one that made a 15-year-old me briefly toy with actually becoming religious. Admittedly, there is a huge black dude as bouncer on the door.
I stumbled on St Thomas's when hosting a member of the Clare College Choir on the sofa at my East Village place. He told me that St Thomas's is one of their regular stops when touring the USA due to the St Thomas Choir of Men and Boys: the best in the English choral tradition in the USA and up there with the best overall. He also left me gravely disappointed when I couldn't talk him into a night of drunken revelry at Coyote Ugly (standards have clearly changed among choir members).
The extra bonus at St Thomas's is the pacifist and internationalist mosaics on the floor when you come in. To promote peace on earth, and in a modern twist on the coats of arms for local gentry at English churches, you can see the flags of France, Flanders, the USA and the Soviet Union.
The singing is beautiful too. Very restful renditions of Thomas Tallis and other staples of the Anglican repertoire. Like the Ukrainians, and the Irish down the road at their great big show-boat of a cathedral (St Paddy's - gleaming after its renovation), this is somewhere an ethnic group comes to reenact the comforting rituals of home: a very American experience for me to share in.