Finding a natural high atop St. John the Divine

If Columbia students live in an ivory tower, rarely do they enjoy the view.

But when climbing the 124-foot stairway to the roof of the Cathedral Church of Saint John the Divine, any apathy towards the draw of urban vistas tends to fly out of the impossibly small and fragile tower windows.

Every Saturday at 12 p.m. and 2 p.m., the cathedral offers hour-long vertical tours. Visitors climb up narrow stone stairs to the cathedral’s upper passageways, the top of a buttress, and finally the roof of the cathedral for a few minutes of the solitude that too often slips between New York’s fingers. The tour has been running weekly since last fall, when it reopened after a long clean-up process after a fire in 2001.

Advance reservations for the tour are recommended—after all, it’s not often that New Yorkers get to be like Quasimodo.

The climb
“Just a precaution: it does get kind of tight in some places.” Warnings like this peppered the welcoming speech of James Baring, the St. John the Divine educator who led this particular tour. One cathedral employee even offered to hold the hand of any nervous visitors as they carved their paths up the architectural Goliath. How this would work in a three- or four-foot-wide stairwell is still a mystery, but the gesture seemed to be nonetheless appreciated.

The adventurers of the 2 p.m. tour were locals in their mid-30s or mid-60s, with very few outliers. Even the frailest of grandmother-types kept her eyes fixed on the dungeon-like wooden door. Behind it, the over 100-foot journey upward awaited.

The tour took to stairs that can best be likened to a life-sized game of Mouse Trap with a fair helping of medieval flair—picture tortuous passageways branching off in a myriad of directions, with polished stone instead of supple rainbow plastic. The stairs are far from a nightmarish vision—sunshine gently spills through the few windows, and where it cannot reach, the light from pint-sized, exposed bulbs contributes. They are free of decaying skeletons and medieval maces (at least as far as the tour revealed), and even the few spider webs are of the distinctly fluffy variety.

The climb can be tolling on post-freshman-15 thighs, and the air, heavy with the weight of sweat and heat. But in a way, it may be better than a student’s worst night crammed in an EC suite­—it’s well lit, the promise of fresh air is nearer than one may think, and there are definitely no looming RAs.

Faith lift
Despite its location in one of the most religiously significant cathedrals of the United States, the tour opts for a distinctly historical and architectural slant. Baring, for one, even distinguished the secular name for the Son of God (“Jesus”) from the religious name (“Christ”), and used the former for the remainder of the tour.

The ascent fragmented cleanly into legs, with two of the most notable being the clerestory and la forêt. The clerestory, or the uppermost level inside the church, puts tourists face-to-face with St. John’s stained glass windows, which are famous for their vibrant colors.

Baring recounted the story of high wire artist Philippe Petit (known from the popular film “Man on Wire”), who set up a high wire to cross the cathedral from the clerestory, unbeknownst to anyone. The police came to arrest him, but the bishop granted him sanctuary under the condition that he become an artist-in-residence for the cathedral for life. He did, and St. John the Divine became home to his meditative library.

La forêt in French means “the forest,” and while there are no redwoods hiding in the uppermost level of St. John the Divine, there is no better term for the structure—it’s dark, damp, and spans for what feels like miles and miles. But if it is a jungle, it’s a metal one. It recalls abandoned warehouses with underused shaky steel walkways leading here and there across endless dark abysses. The drop from the walkway was markedly less dramatic than even standing on the exterior buttress, but the eerie darkness below made it the uneasiest destination.

The physical purpose of la forêt is to protect the roof of the nave—the tiled mountain around which the walkways revolve—from the elements. Trial and error taught cathedral builders that metal beats wood when it comes to lightening. It also taught them that, as ironic as it may sound, having a roof for the roof is a solid investment.

Top of the block
At Columbia, culture is too often outsourced. In the hodgepodge of Ricky’s NYC openings and Morningside Bookshop closings, Columbians have grown used to living in a faceless, student-run Gotham. But St. John the Divine is right next door, and if it’s history (and infamy, at least construction-wise) doesn’t beckon to students, the view from its roof surely will.

A gentle slope reveals an overlooked face of New York—the once-glass and now-yellow brick dome on top of St. Luke’s Hospital, the upward reach of Riverside Church, and the greener pastures spattered in the distance, which alternate with the fickle urban landmass ahead.

It’s a view not nearly as exhilarating as one from Times Square, or even from the forbidden roof of the International Affairs Building at night. It’s quiet, quaint, and unassuming. It’s one of the highest points in the neighborhood, and yet still one of the most grounded.