Description of the attraction
The Cathedral of St. John the Divine on Amsterdam Avenue is the fourth largest Christian church in the world. Its construction has not yet been completed; the history of the erection of the colossal building resembles the epics of medieval temples.
The cathedral belongs to the Episcopal Church of the United States - a branch of the Anglican Church that stood apart during the Revolutionary War. The head of the Anglicans is the British monarch - therefore, the clergy of the settled colonies established a church independent of the recent metropolis. Thus, she is Protestant.
In 1887, Bishop Henry Codman Potter came up with the idea of building a Protestant cathedral, equal in size and appeal to the Catholic Cathedral of St. Patrick on Fifth Avenue. The Byzantine-Romanesque project was designed by architects George Lewis Haynes and Christopher Grant Lafarge, and construction began in 1892. From the very beginning, it faced difficulties: due to weak soils, the foundation had to be buried 22 meters. By 1900, only a huge crypt was built, in which the services were initially held. By 1911, it became clear that the original design of the building was outdated, the Byzantine-Romanesque style was out of fashion. Architect Ralph Adams Cram, a supporter of the Gothic style, in which he saw the pinnacle of Western architecture, was brought in to rework the project.
The first stone of the nave was laid in 1925. The New York committee to raise funds for the construction of the cathedral was chaired by attorney Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who became president of the United States eight years later. Thanks to the money collected, the work continued even during the Great Depression.
The cathedral was opened on November 30, 1941, a week before the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. During the war years, work stopped: the episcopate considered that in difficult times the resources of the church were better spent on deeds of mercy, and there were not enough workers. The architect Cram still cherished the idea of replacing the Byzantine dome with Gothic towers, but the plan was never realized, the cathedral combines different architectural styles. In 1979, New York Mayor Edward Koch joked: “I was told that some of the great cathedrals took five hundred years to build. We are still in the first century."
The temple is huge: it is two football fields long, it can accommodate 5 thousand believers. If you do not know its history, you can think of it as an example of the late Gothic of northern France around the 13th century. The huge bronze doors of the western facade of the cathedral were made by the architect and designer Henry Wilson. They depict scenes from the New and Old Testaments. The rose window above the entrance is the largest stained glass window in the United States; the monumental artist Charles Connick made it from ten thousand pieces of glass. The seven chapels of the cathedral are known as "chapels of tongues", they are dedicated to the heavenly patrons of various ethnic groups in New York. Nearby - a memorial to firefighters who died in the line of duty.
Near the cathedral there is a sculpture by Greg Wyatt "The Fountain of Peace" - it allegorically depicts the struggle between good and evil. Thinkers and philosophers are depicted on the tablets around the fountain (in which there is never water): Gandhi, Socrates, Einstein, John Lennon. The cathedral celebrates the feast of St. Francis every year, where animals are blessed, including camels and elephants.
