Pierre Toussaint was born a slave on a plantation in Saint-Domingue and brought to New York by the Bérard family in the 1790s, as the revolution that would make Haiti was beginning. His owner apprenticed him to a leading hairdresser. It was a lucrative trade in a city of formal coiffure, and it made him, while still a slave, one of the best-paid men of his craft in New York.
When Jean Bérard died in Saint-Domingue and the family's fortune went with the revolution, his widow was left with nothing in a foreign city. Toussaint supported her, in her own house, for years, and never told her that he was doing it. She freed him on her deathbed in 1807. He married Juliette Noel in 1811 and the two of them spent the rest of their lives giving the money away: they took orphans into their home, nursed the sick through yellow fever epidemics when those who could afford to leave the city had left, helped to fund the first Catholic orphanage in New York and the building of Old St Patrick's on Mott Street, and paid for the education of a great many people who never knew where the money came from.
He went to Mass at Old St Patrick's every morning for more than sixty years, including the years when he was turned away at the door of the new cathedral for the colour of his skin. He died on 30 June 1853 at eighty-seven. In 1990 his remains were moved from the old churchyard to the crypt beneath the high altar of St Patrick's Cathedral on Fifth Avenue, where the archbishops of New York are buried and where he is the only layman. John Paul II declared him Venerable in 1996.