Cathedral of St. John the Divine

One of the largest churches in the world, under construction since 1892 and still unfinished

Local name: Cathedral of St. John the Divine

Collection: Harlem and Upper Manhattan · USA · Open in OpenStreetMap

The cathedral’s tower and the pointed windows of the nave · Rochester, CC BY-SA 4.0, Wikimedia Commons

The story

Before you is the Cathedral of St. John the Divine, the mother church of the Episcopal Diocese of New York. People jokingly call it “St. John the Unfinished.” The cornerstone was laid on the twenty-seventh of December 1892, St. John’s Day. In the spring the builders began digging and ran into soft rock and an underground spring. The foundation was not finished until 1895. The first architects, Heins and LaFarge, planned a church in the Byzantine and Romanesque spirit. For the east end they ordered eight granite columns, each about 54 feet tall. They could not be turned in one piece: the stone kept cracking. So each column was made in two sections, and they were raised in the summer of 1904. In 1911 Ralph Adams Cram became the lead architect, and the cathedral was redesigned in the Gothic style. A major fundraising drive in 1925 was led by Franklin D. Roosevelt, the future president. On the thirtieth of November 1941, the cathedral opened along its full length for the first time: 601 feet. A week later the United States entered World War Two, and construction stopped. The south transept and the western towers have never been finished. In 1982, when work resumed on the south tower, the high-wire artist Philippe Petit walked a wire across Amsterdam Avenue. On the eighteenth of December 2001 a fire damaged the north transept, and later the whole interior was cleaned of soot. Even unfinished, it remains one of the largest churches in the world.

Visiting

1047 Amsterdam Avenue, between 110th and 113th Streets. Subway: the 1 train to Cathedral Parkway–110th Street. This is a working cathedral. Opening hours and admission for visitors are on the cathedral’s website, stjohndivine.org; please keep quiet during services.