On Sunday, the nave of the Cathedral Church of St. John the Divine was rededicated after nearly seven years of renovation. Sunday’s ceremony marked the end of the nave’s reconstruction following a fire in 2001. Despite this reopening, the Church—known to some as “St. John the Unfinished” for its perpetual state of construction—remains incomplete.
Many within the Church, located on Amsterdam Avenue at 110th Street, see its architectural quirks and incompleteness as an important reflection of the Church’s interdenominational and multicultural principles, which have guided its development since its conception.
“The founders of the Church knew that if they were going to build a church this big that it couldn’t just be an Episcopal Church—it had to welcome all of New York,” Jonathan Korzen, director of communications at the church, said. He added that the first cornerstone had been laid in 1892, the same year as the founding of Ellis Island.
The church’s design, selected through a competition, was initially in the then-fashionable Romanesque-Byzantine style. Yet construction was slow and costly, partly due to the church’s determination to use medieval technology, and development eventually ground to a halt.
In 1907, newly hired architect Ralph Adams Cram chose Gothic style for the remainder of the church’s design. In the spirit of the times, Cram designed seven chapels known as the “Chapels of the Tongues,” each of which is dedicated to prominent immigrant groups. Those represented include Scandinavians, Germans, Celts, Spanish, French, Italians, and Asians.
The complete nave was finally dedicated in November of 1941, but just one week later the bombing of Pearl Harbor shook the country and construction stopped again.
“Workers literally left their tools where they were and went down to the enlistment center to join up and serve in World War II,” Korzen said.
Construction resumed in the 1970s on the front façade of the building and other parts, but in 2001, a raging fire gutted much of the building and did damage to the church’s organ.
This latest round of reconstruction—which cost around $41.5 million— was financed by the cathedral’s insurance claim with the Church Insurance Companies, an Episcopal organization, and private donors, according to the New York Times. Stephen Facey, the executive vice president of the cathedral, said scaffolding and cleaning accounted for about 50 percent of the cost.
Despite the fractured progress of its construction, the Church seems almost to revel in its quirky design, which makes it a testament to the changing culture of New York and to major events in American history. In a way, the uncompleted church itself—touted by major newspapers as the largest Gothic cathedral in the world— has become a cultural landmark in its own right. According to Korzen, there are “no plans to undergo the completion of the North Tower which was abandoned during World War II,” testifying to the community’s love of its bizarre architectural conception.
The church complex is filled with minute bizarre features. The Sports Bay features a stained-glass window depicting various modern-day sports, supposedly in reference to Biblical athletes. The Communications Bay window features a television set. Various statues feature miniatures of figures as wide-ranging as Abraham Lincoln and Mahatma Gandhi.
Andrew Dolkart, the director of the Historical Preservation Program at Columbia’s Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation, said that the church was definitely an “interesting” piece of work. While admitting that Americans often borrowed from European tradition, he said, “I just find it a curious thing that in modern America they would build this huge Gothic Cathedral. It’s almost as if they’re making a statement, trying to defy the commercial culture of New York.”
And St. John’s does indeed make a statement of diversity in its architecture, which its leaders were quick to emphasize in Sunday’s rededication ceremony. According to the New York Times, many prominent Catholic cardinals and rabbis of New York were in attendance, along with the selected Secretary of State to president-elect Barack Obama, CC ’83, Hillary Clinton. The building itself holds the seat of the Episcopal archdiocese of New York.
“Our guests, for various ecumenical reasons, supported us by showing up in great numbers on Sunday,” said Korzen. More than a hundred years of quirkiness and multiculturalism, its seems, go a long way.
