Cathedral of Saint John The Divine - History

History

In 1887 Bishop Henry Codman Potter of the Episcopal Diocese of New York called for a cathedral to rival St. Patrick's Cathedral in Manhattan. An 11.5-acre (4.7 ha) property, on which the Leake and Watts Orphan Asylum had stood, was purchased by deed for the cathedral in 1891. After an open competition, a design by the New York firm of George Lewis Heins and C. Grant LaFarge in a Byzantine-Romanesque style was accepted the next year.

Construction on the cathedral was begun with the laying of the cornerstone on December 27, 1892, St. John's Day, when Bishop Henry Potter hit the stone three times with a mallet and said "Other foundation can no man lay, than that is laid which is Jesus Christ.". The foundations were completed at enormous expense, largely because bedrock was not struck until the excavation had reached 72 feet (22 m). The walls were built around eight massive 130-ton, 50-foot (15 m) granite columns, sourced from Vinalhaven, Maine and said to be the largest in the world. The columns, which were transported to New York on a specially constructed barge towed by the large steam tug Clara Clarita, took more than a year to install.

The first services were held in the crypt, under the crossing in 1899. The Ardolino brothers from Torre di Nocelli, Italy, did much of the stone carving work on the statues designed by the English sculptor John Angel. After the large central dome made of Guastavino tile was completed in 1909, the original Byzantine-Romanesque design was changed to a Gothic design. Increasing friction after the premature death of Heins in 1907 ultimately led the Trustees to dismiss the surviving architect, Christopher Grant LaFarge, and hire the noted Gothic Revival architect Ralph Adams Cram to design the nave and "Gothicize" what LaFarge had already built. In 1911, the choir and the crossing were opened, and the foundation for Cram's nave began to be excavated in 1916.

The first stone of the nave was laid and the west front was undertaken in 1925. Bishop William T. Manning had announced a $10 million capital campaign to raise money for this project at a major press conference; the New York campaign committee was headed by Franklin D. Roosevelt. Work at the church went on during the Great Depression as a result of monies raised in this campaign.

The Cathedral was opened end-to-end for the first time on November 30, 1941, a week before the bombing of Pearl Harbor. Subsequently construction on the cathedral was halted, because the then-bishop felt that the church's funds would better be spent on works of charity, and because the United States' subsequent involvement with the Second World War greatly limited available manpower. Although Cram intended to dismantle the dome and construct a massive Gothic tower in its place, this plan was never realized. The result is that the Cathedral reflects a mixture of architectural styles, with a Gothic nave, a Romanesque crossing under the dome; chapels in French, English and Spanish Gothic styles, as well as Norman and Byzantine; Gothic choir stalls, and Roman arches and columns separating the high altar and ambulatory.

The Very Reverend James Parks Morton, who became dean of the cathedral in 1972, fostered projects to enable it to become "a holy place for the whole city" and encouraged a revival in the construction of the Cathedral. In 1979 the then bishop, the Right Reverend Paul Moore, Jr., decided that construction should be continued, in part to preserve the crafts of stonemasonry by training neighborhood youths, thus providing them with a valuable skill. In 1979, Mayor Ed Koch quipped during the dedication ceremony, "I am told that some of the great cathedrals took over five hundred years to build. But I would like to remind you that we are only in our first hundred years."

One architect who worked for Cram and Ferguson as a young man, John Thomas Doran, eventually became a full partner. (Cram and Ferguson became known as Hoyle, Doran and Berry. The firm exists today as HDB/ Cram and Ferguson). The November 1979 edition of LIFE magazine featured St. John the Divine Cathedral. To quote the magazine: (p. 102)

"One architect from Cram's firm survives. At 80, John Doran is among the last architects able to draw Gothic plans - the difficult style is not taught in schools. He is helping St. John's new generation of builders. "Nothing I've done," Doran says, "has held my interest like the cathedral. Everything since then has just been making a living."

Construction on the south tower resumed for some years in the 1980s, during which campaign another 50 feet (15 m) of height was added, in limestone rather than the granite of the original construction. Following the abandonment of this initiative, the scaffolding that had been erected around the south tower remained, rusting away (until it was removed in the summer of 2007).

Under master stone carvers Simon Verity and Jean Claude Marchionni, work on the statuary of the central portal of the Cathedral's western façade was completed in 1997. The Cathedral has since seen no further construction, and the new generation of trained stonecarvers has gone on to other projects.

On December 18, 2001, a substantial fire destroyed the north transept and covered the pipe organ with soot.