Cathedral St. John The Divine
Website: http://www.stjohndivine.org/
The Cathedral of St. John the Divine, is the Mother Church of the Episcopal Diocese of New York and the seat of its Bishop. The cathedral, a popular tourist attraction, is, though unfinished, the largest cathedral in the world, according to the Guinness Book of World's Records (neither St Peter's in Rome nor Notre-Dame de la Paix in Yamoussoukro—both significantly larger than St. John the Divine—are cathedrals).  |
Without slavishly copying any one historical model, and without compromising its authentic stone-on-stone construction by using modern steel girders, Saint John the Divine is a refined exercise in the 13th century High Gothic style of northern France. The Cathedral is almost exactly two football fields in length (601 feet or 186 meters) and the nave ceiling reaches 124 feet (37.7 meters) high. It is the longest Gothic nave in the world, at 230 feet. Seven chapels radiating from the ambulatory behind the choir are each in a distinctive nationalistic style, some of them borrowing from outside the gothic vocabulary. Known as the "Chapels of the Tongues" (Ansgar, Boniface, Columba, Savior, Martin, Ambrose and James), their designs are meant to represent each of the seven most prominent ethnic groups to first immigrate to New York City upon the opening of Ellis Island in 1892 (the same year the Cathedral began construction).The first stone of the nave was laid and the west front was undertaken in 1925. The first services in the nave were held the day 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 America's subsequent involvement with the Second World War greatly limited available manpower. The Very Rev. James Parks Morton, who became Dean of the Cathedral in 1972, encouraged a revival in the construction of the Cathedral, and in 1979 the Rt. Rev. Paul Moore, Jr., then Bishop, 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. Construction on the towers continued until the early 1990s, when the national economic recession forced its abandonment. 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 since gone on to other projects. In 2003, the Cathedral was designated a landmark by the New York City Landmarks Preservation Commission.
Address: 1047 Amsterdam Avenue (between West 110th Street and 113 Street) | 
