New York, USA: The catacombs under Manhattan's St Patrick's Cathedral are full of intrigue and atmosphere

Mention that you' are going to tour the catacombs under St Patrick's Cathedral in New York and people assume it's the neo-gothic pile facing the Rockefeller Centre on Fifth Avenue rather than the Basilica of St Patrick's Old Cathedral in Manhattan's Nolita neighbourhood.

If buildings were people this would be the equivalent of sibling rivalry as the new "baby" garners all the attention and the older child gets ignored.

And so it was in 1879 when the new cathedral opened and cast one hell of a metaphorical shadow over the comparatively little sister that had been the head of Roman Catholicism in New York since 1815.

Today, the gothic revival building sits, somewhat unheralded, between Prince and Houston streets, though movie buffs would probably recognise it in scenes from The Godfather, The Godfather Part III and Martin Scorsese's Mean Streets.

We meet for the tour in a small white room opposite the basilica, where Mike Vogel, in the wonderfully nasal accent of a Brooklyn native, gives us a short history lesson before we head across the road and enter the walled churchyard.

This area, he explains, was where Scorsese grew up. It was the stamping ground of the notoriously anti-Catholic Bowery Boys, an area of organised crime and slum tenements which has today become one of the most expensive neighbourhoods in New York. Local luminaries include, he says, Justin Timberlake and Alicia Keys. And, he says, pointing to a large grey excrescence on the top of a nearby red-brick tenement building, that's where David Bowie lived with his wife, Iman, before his death in 2016.

The tour is absorbing even before we get to the catacombs. Quite apart from the stories about the characters and luminaries buried in the grounds, Vogel is an endless fount of information and quite rightly points out that "no church has ever had a more boring frontage".

We also stop to admire the last resting place of French-born John Dubois, the first non-Irish Bishop of New York. Dubois was buried – at his own request – under the pavement at the entrance to the cathedral so that people could "walk on me in death, as they wished to in life". As Vogel says: "Go figure."

The catacombs aren't large – this isn't your Parisian-style necropolis full of skulls and skeletons – but what they lack in size they make up for in intrigue and atmosphere. We are each given a battery-operated tea light and head through two large Game of Thrones-style studded wooden doors into the eerily-lit passageways beneath the church.