Unfinished Cathedral

Unlike the skyscrapers further down Manhattan Island, Manhattan's Cathedral of St. John the Divine has been a long time agrowing. Already some $16,000,000 and 52 years of labor have gone into it--and it is still only two-thirds built. Last week the Right Rev. William Thomas Manning, 79, Episcopal Bishop of New York, whose pride & joy the Cathedral is, proposed to finish it. He asked cathedral-goers for $10,000,000 more to do the job. With that amount the job might be done in six years.

Some of the 52 years' work already in vested in the Cathedral stems from a concern for craftsmanship (St. John's scorns the use of steel girders, has built its own walls of solid granite). And when reproached for slowness its builders are content to recall that Chartres Cathedral took two centuries to finish. But most of St. John's delay--other than financial--involves a gigantic architectural indecision and eventual about-face. In 1911, after the choir and sanctuary had been built in heavy Romanesque, a new architect (the late Ralph Adams Cram) decided to go Gothic. Today St. John's is Gothic fore & aft, with a great chunk of Romanesque amidships. The odd combination of Gothic's aspiring points and lacy frets with Romanesque's rounded arches is still bedeviling builders.

Bishop Manning's first ambition is to tear down the reredos, a carved stone screen built behind the high altar in 1909. Removing it, he said, will make the west-east interior view "the longest unbroken vista in Christendom" (one-ninth of a mile). Such superlatives are characteristic of St. John's, which when finished will be the world's second biggest church (bigger: St. Peter's in the Vatican), and the biggest of Gothic design. Still to come (see cuts): the upper half of two west towers, one more transept, and part of another, a great (402 ft.) central tower.

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