In 1868, horse-drawn carriages delivered the ten-thousand-odd components of a giant pipe organ from the factory of Henry Erben, near Manhattan’s Five Points neighborhood, to St. Patrick’s Basilica, on Mott and Prince.

The parish, then largely Irish, was still grieving the loss of so many young men from the Fighting 69th at Bull Run and Antietam. Moneyed interests were moving uptown. Erben’s organs, meanwhile, were regularly shipped thousands of miles, to Havana, Caracas, the Western frontier.