In New York: Mortar and the Cathedral

By James Wilde

In the Middle Ages, cathedrals often took hundreds of years to build. Slowly stretching skyward, they consumed the passionate skill and, indeed, the entire lives of generations of carpenters and stonecutters. The building of a cathedral, after all, is mystical work. It requires men to celebrate the glory of God in stone, with each individual stone serving as the unique calling card of the mason who finishes it and sets it in place. The architectural reach toward heaven drove men to build ever higher, to put in larger and larger windows, to shape cathedrals of lighter and lighter stone until, at places like Beauvais and Amiens, cathedrals seemed to be made of wind and glass.

This arcane form of prayer has been little known in the New World. But now, after a 38-year delay, a dozen hand-picked local apprentices under the direction of an English master builder are hard at work trying to finish Manhattan's Cathedral Church of St. John the Divine. They are building a gallery and two towers above the western facade, appropriately named for Sts. Peter and Paul.

The man in charge is James Robert Bambridge, 53. He earned his rank of master builder by finishing the Anglican cathedral in Liverpool, an effort that took ten years, from 1967 to 1977. Before that, Bambridge was called in to restore the Houses of Parliament after World War II.

In a time obsessed with speed, when pride in workmanship is in decline, the very existence of such a project is both a challenge and a contradiction in terms. To build the 153-ft. towers, fully 24,000 pieces of Indiana limestone must be cut and individually shaped. The project is expected to take 30 years, and real construction cannot even begin until 7,200 stones have been finished. "We are working just as they did in medieval times," says Bambridge. "In the 18 months since work began we have completed over 1,000 stones."

Financing of the work has moved at a similar pace. When the project began, the cathedral had $5 million in the kitty, enough for five years' work. But there has been much anguish over whether the estimated $21 million needed to finish the job wouldn't be better spent on the poor. "I am a people person, not a stone person," admits the Right Rev. Paul Moore Jr., the cathedral's liberal bishop. "At first I was opposed. But the public response has been overwhelming." Moore is now a strong partisan of the project.

The original work on the cathedral stopped in December 1941 because of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. But Architect Ralph Adams Cram left plans for the towers, which Bambridge now consults in a dungeon-like room under the bishop's office. "It's like a giant jigsaw puzzle," he explains, pottering around in a pair of tartan carpet slippers. Bambridge makes large drawings of the more complicated bits--perpendicular tracery, buttresses, gables, turrets and pinnacles. From the blueprints, he designs each stone individually on a numbered job card marked with height, width, length. There is also a scale drawing to show the apprentice stonecutter what the finished stone should look like. "To be a good mason you must have an eye for surfaces," says Bambridge. "You must visualize the finished job before you start, so when you drop down into the stone with your chisel, you know where you are headed. Keep your elbow tucked tightly to your side. Don't tap the stone like a chicken. Be authoritative. Strike the chisel forcefully with regular beat. I was careful to pick people who are not discouraged by cold hands and feet."

The yard where the stonework is done has a machine shop and "banking shop." First, four apprentices cut ten-ton blocks of Indiana limestone into manageable pieces with a frame saw two stories high. The resulting slabs are sliced into smaller pieces, called stones, with circular saws that have diamond cutting edges. Then all the stones go to the banking shop, where apprentices, working at waist-high tables, shape them into basic cathedral building blocks (ashlars), cornerstones (quoins) and structural supports (pier stones).

The Bambridge work gang is no ordinary group of hardhats. Explains Poni Baptiste, 28, a black sculptor from nearby Harlem: "For those of us in the valley, the cathedral was the castle on the hill. I saw my friends killed by overdoses and by the cops. I wanted to be involved in social art. I love coming here. I can't leave any stone unresolved." Like medieval apprentices, Poni's fellow workers range in age from 20 to 35. Most came from the ghetto and have some interest in art. A few gave up good jobs to join the project. To work so hard for $7.50 an hour with wife and children to support, or parents, is itself an inspired commitment. Like the man who chose them, they all have a touch of grace and gentleness, a lust for stone, an eye for eternity.

"What fascinates me," says Ruben Gibson, 32, a black from The Bronx, "is when we lay the stone for the cathedral the same way it comes from the ground, the grain horizontal. St. John the Divine is really a gray mountain." Gibson is foreman of the machine shop. He supervises the lifting of the big limestone slabs from the trucks. Then with chalk he diagrams each block with the outlines of the dozen or more stones that must be cut from it. "The great trick is not to waste any. They are very expensive and they cost as much to ship as to buy. We have to squeeze out every inch." Gibson spent two years in The Bronx as a monk in the Ethiopian Orthodox Church. Inside the cathedral, he will tell you, he soars beyond the "furthest reaches of space."

James Jamieson, 26, is a burly black who seems made of cannonballs. "I was an impatient person before I came here," he says with a grin. "Now I'm building something to last ten thousand years." Then he's off in a flurry of stone chips as he puts down his first draft, a half-inch cut, the width of the chisel, along the stone's edge. When he began with Bambridge, it took him three days to make an ashlar. Now he can turn one out in 15 minutes. Jamieson, an ex-butcher, has completed 18 months of his four-year apprenticeship. He finished second in a recent stonecutting competition to determine which of the apprentices would go to Bath, England, for special training. Next time he intends to be first.

The man who beat Jamieson is D'Ellis Kincanon, 25. Part Chickasaw Indian and wiry as a heather bush, Kincanon can tap stone all day on a pint of yogurt. His face is ecstatic, like a Sufi mystic's, as he finishes off a pier stone. "Everything works in sacred harmony," he says, but adds that he has never worked under such competitive conditions. "Already we're doing senior apprentice work. Bambridge is pushing us for all we are worth."

At 20, Joseph Apie is the baby, and the truest, rawest talent of them all. The dudes on his block in Spanish Harlem have seen Apie on television and they think he is righteous because he is doing something honorable. "I want to be here till the cathedral is finished," he says. "I know the stone will be here for thousands of years. People will come and look and marvel. Sometimes I finish a job and I say 'Wow!' and I sing to the stone."

Old masons say a man will rub enough skin from his hands to make an ankle-length smithy's apron before he masters the art of cutting stone worthy of dressing a cathedral. But in return he is the apple of God's eye, as this stoneworkers' fable illustrates: There was once a mason's wife who enjoyed watching her husband work in the cathedral while she sewed. The bishop knew them both and it became ritual to exchange pleasantries. One day the mason told the bishop his wife was dying and dearly wished to be laid to rest in the cathedral. The bishop haltingly explained such hallowed ground was not for masons' wives. Some weeks later his lordship politely inquired where the mason had buried his wife. "There," said the mason, pointing to a freshly set pier stone. He had mixed her ashes in the mortar. "You are very rare and precious to God," the bishop humbly replied. --By James Wilde

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