Month: August 2025

Angel Escobar makes his way to the Stoneyard

As a boy growing up in East Harlem, Angel Escobar would look across 112th Street at the looming structure rising on Morningside Heights to the West. “When I was small, I used to wonder what that big thing was,” he said. A few years later, he would pick up a mallet and chisel to help build the tower at The Cathedral of St. John the Divine. “I never thought I would be working at the church,” Angel adds. 

“I was hanging out a lot on the streets by the time I was in my teens. My mother had died and I dropped out of school,” Angel remembers. “I had to do for myself.” 

“Me, I didn’t like being in the street. So when I heard the Renegades had given up their chains and stopped fighting to do something for the community, I found out about it,” Angel continues. 

A New York Times article reported, “a youth gang called the Renegades (sometimes spelled Renigades) is using city loan funds and their own labor to create new homes for their families out of a battered and abandoned East Harlem tenement.” This was the beginning of “sweat equity” or “urban homesteading” and Angel started learning the building trades. The outfit he was working for went out of business and the owner recommended that Angel apply to the Cathedral’s Stoneyard program. Coincidentally, the same NYT article also stated “the Cathedral Church of St. John the Divine announced plans to support sweat‐equity rehabilitations over the next two years that would involve 200 abandoned slum buildings that contain 3,000 apartments.”

Angel would now be working at the big church on top of the hill.

As a trainee, the soft spoken and introverted Angel moved limestone blocks around the machinery shop and drove the crane and forklift that transported finished stones from the cutting shed to the stacks by the side of the Cathedral for the first two years. 

Angel would occasionally be treated to homemade lunch brought to the Stoneyard by his wife Maritza and oldest daughter Angela, who remembers walking through the Cathedral to get to the Stoneyard. As a 5-year-old, “I was afraid of the huge stone statues,” she said.

Initially, Angel was intimidated by Master Mason Alan Bird, the primary instructor for the apprentices, and was reluctant to move into stone cutting. “I was scared to be a stonecutter,” he said, “because Alan was so strict, you made a mistake he’d get on your case. I didn’t want to cut stone; I was scared to cut it. I didn’t want to make mistakes.” 

Angel credits Ruben Gibson, a fellow apprentice who started shortly after Angel, for helping him overcome his fears. “Ruben put it in me, he put confidence in me. He made me a stonecutter. He believed in me. I loved Ruben,” Angel said.

Once Angel started working as a banker mason, he got help from others.

Timothy Smith recalls that Angel could cut his stones exactly up to the zinc template measurements – but Angel needed some lessons in fractions. At first, Angel had trouble understanding that the larger the number of the fraction, the smaller the measurement actually was. Timothy gave Angel a tutorial on a whiteboard: ½ inch is larger than ¼ inch and 1/64 inch is smaller than 1/32 inch. Angel caught on quickly.

Eddie Pizarro, another stonecutter from East Harlem, compliments Angel’s cutting skills: “To me, Angel had the best boasting pattern. Very neat. All his finished stones looked the same. He always had a steady hand for boasting the stone.”

Angel also got direction from José Tapia. “He taught me a lot,” he reminisces. 

Angel refers to José as “my brother” because José lived with Angel’s family after José’s parents died in an auto accident in Puerto Rico. Angel’s mother and José’s mother were sisters, so Angel’s mother “took him (José) in, a cousin, but raised by my family,” Angel explains.

José also brought in another member of the extended family to the Stoneyard when Eddie Pizarro, another cousin, came on board. All three share the same paternal grandparents who were from Ponce, PR.

According to Eddie, the cousins “all had different opinions; we were raised to use what you are good at and make a living in the construction field. The Stoneyard united us and Angel kept us focused,” he said. “I remember (Angel) telling us we are here (at the Stoneyard) to make history and we will always be remembered and, to this day, it is true.”  

As Angel’s skills and confidence grew cutting intricate blocks in the cutting shed, another opportunity came up and, once again, Ruben Gibson provided the necessary push.

The Cathedral program needed to start training some apprentice stonecutters in the art of stone carving. Following a blind carving competition, Master Carver Nicholas Fairplay, recognizing Angel’s potential, named him a candidate for the carving program. 

“I was scared to do carving, but then again Ruben came in and put confidence in me and started teaching me. It was kind of easy for me because I used to draw faces on the stones and Ruben picked up on that. Ruben had a way of getting to me,” Angel said. “The way Ruben explained stuff, he made it seem easy. Ruben wanted me in the (carving) shed bad!”

However, Angel was not ready to give up working in the cutting shed so he moved between cutting and carving as the needs dictated. Angel could just as easily cut a springer or tracery stone as he could carve foliage on a crocket or create a unique Gothic face on a cornice stone. Angel must have been very happy to work in the carving shed when his mentor Ruben became lead carver. 

In the summer months when construction on the tower was the focus, Angel occasionally worked topside moving stones from below to the construction floor or helping to set stones. This may have been his least favorite job: “I’m afraid of heights,” he confessed. 

There was significant upheaval in the Stoneyard towards the end of the 1980s when funding for the tower construction dried up. Dean James Parks Morton invited David M. Teitelbaum, a real estate developer with an interest in urban preservation, to expand the Stoneyard. The partnership, Cathedral Stoneworks, worked on outside jobs, such as the Jewish Museum, with part of the profits to be plowed back into the cathedral and allow tower construction to resume.

During the years of Cathedral Stoneworks, Angel took on new responsibilities. The reluctant stonecutter and the hesitant stonecarver stepped up. In a promotional brochure Angel said, “Now I’m lead cutter, teaching the apprentices and still learning.” 

Teitelbaum invested heavily in advanced machinery but a real estate crash in 1990 devastated financing for cathedral building and outside building projects, forcing him to close the shop around 1993. 

Afterwards, Angel worked briefly at a downtown antiques gallery installing fireplaces but he did not stay long. It was a “pretty nice job, but it wasn’t like the Stoneyard,” he recalls. He moved on to freelance construction jobs but no more stone cutting. 

Looking back over his 13-year career at the Cathedral, Angel would have loved teaching the next generation of stonecutters if the program had continued, a role he saw for himself. “It’s a skill that you never forget,” he said.

Asked if he thought the Cathedral would ever resume rebuilding, Angel ponders, “perhaps…that’s the way churches work.”

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• New York Times – January 25, 1974
• New York Times – February 23, 2001
• Cathedral Stoneworks brochure

This post is the continuing series of articles about the historic stones in the Cathedral, written by Senior Guide Tom Fedorek.– RM

The Cathedral of St. John the Divine has many details that most visitors either do not notice, or, if they do notice them, do not understand their meaning or significance. Such are the artifacts that are the subject of this article – two remnants of a thirteenth-century cathedral that was nearly destroyed in the First World War, Notre-Dame de Reims.

This article tells you where to find them. But first  – why Reims? Of the many historic buildings that were damaged or destroyed in the war, what was exceptional about Reims Cathedral?

Notre-Dame de Reims

Reims is the soul of France embodied in stone. “Reims is the national cathedral. Others are catholic, she alone is French,” writes Emile Mâle in The Gothic Image, using “catholic” in its lower-case sense of “universal.” 

For centuries, Reims Cathedral was where the kings of France were crowned. At the climax of the coronation ceremony –  the anointment of the new monarch –  the Archbishop of Reims, alone among his peers, was invested with the power to administer the chrism (holy oil). This tradition began in 508 when Archbishop Remi anointed Clovis, king of the Franks, at his baptism. In the image below, Remi holds a ewer with the holy water of baptism in his right hand and, in his left, an aspergillum for sprinkling the congregation.

The second element of the baptismal rite is anointment with holy oil. Legend has it that at Clovis’s baptism, a pure white dove descended from the heavens with a vial of chrism in its beak and placed it in Remi’s hands. Ever after, the same vial of chrism was used for coronations. Between 1027 and 1825, thirty out of thirty-two coronations were held in Reims Cathedral and its tenth-century predecessor.

Even after the monarchy ended in the nineteenth century, Reims continued to hold a special place in the hearts and minds of the French, much as Westminster Abbey does for the British, and the Statue of Liberty for Americans. 

Ralph Adams Cram, the architect of St. John the Divine’s neo-Gothic western half, venerated Reims above all other cathedrals, writing in his book The Substance of Gothic:

It was the crowning monument, in material form, of Christian civilization; so perfect in all its parts that it was perhaps too perfect, as being more perfect than man should be permitted to attain, an infringement on the creative power of God. Beyond this was nothing greater… 

Writing in 1916, Cram used the past tense because two years earlier, Reims had become one of the first of the many architectural casualties of World War I. In September 1914, German forces fired more than 400 shells at the cathedral, which was then serving as a hospital for wounded French soldiers. The bombardment set fire to the roof, gouged buttresses, and mutilated sculpture on the exterior. Shells punctured the vaulting and devastated much of the interior.

Cram grieved the loss of his most beloved cathedral in Heart of Europe, also published in 1916:

All is now gone, the glorious and the insignificant alike overwhelmed in indiscriminating ruin. The glass and the statues that had survived war, revolution, and stupidity are shattered in fragments, the roofs consumed by fire, the vaults burst asunder, the carved stones calcined and flaking hourly in a dreary rain on blood-stained pavements where a hundred kings have trod and into deserted streets that have echoed to the footsteps of threescore generations.

The Allies lost no time in exploiting the assault on Reims for propaganda purposes, including the United States once it abandoned its neutrality and entered the war in 1917. Dozens of posters promoting recruitment and war bonds featured Reims as “the martyred cathedral.” Three examples appear below.

A recruitment poster aimed at French Canadians has Marianne, the French “goddess of liberty,” asking “Are you waiting for ours to burn?”

An armored fist crushes Reims in a merciless grip while the text below encourages Americans to “Buy war bonds with cash and buy them in installments! And do it now!”

In a nightmarish American recruitment poster, an enraged, sex-crazed, and thoroughly dehumanized Prussian wades onto American shores. Across the ocean, Reims stands in ruins.

While the war raged in Europe, St. John the Divine resumed work on the apsidal chapels that had been left unbuilt when construction halted in 1911. The chapels dedicated to St. Martin and St. Ambrose were constructed during the war years and completed in 1918, the year of the Armistice. 

It is in these chapels that we find the remnants of Reims.

The Chapel of St. Martin

I read the Chapel of St. Martin as Cram’s elegy for Reims. 

His design, pure thirteenth-century Gothic, accomplishes something remarkable. Cram succeeds in creating a space that is not only intimate but also, in its own small way, majestic. He does this by adding a triforium with lancet windows above. A triforium – a walkway between the upper and lower ranks of windows – is something one ordinarily sees in the nave of a cathedral. The chapel’s triforium and clerestory windows transform it into a miniature cathedral.

The windows that Charles Connick created for the chapel narrate the lives of three French saints – Martin, Louis, and Joan of Arc – along with heraldry signifying the cathedral cities associated with them. Four of the seven windows refer to Reims:

Clockwise from upper left: Coronation of Charles VII in Reims, Joan of Arc on right; coronation of Louis IX; Arms of the City of Reims; Arms of the Archdiocese of Reims. Charles Connick, stained glass, 1922

Behind the chapel’s altar stands a blind arcade of four three-lobed arches. Five small trefoils (three-lobed circles) appear within the spandrels (the spaces between the curve of each arch and the border above). Above the altar and inside the middle trefoil, there appears to be a pebble. The pebble is a fragment of Reims dislodged by the bombardment. It sits directly above the midpoint of the altar where the sacrament is celebrated as if it were a relic of a saint – or a martyr . 

Left – Chapel of St. Martin. The red arrow indicates the location of the Reims fragment. Right – Close-up of Reims fragment. Photos: Tom Fedorek.

The 1965 guidebook to St. John the Divine explains how the fragment came to New York: “Cardinal Mercier procured [the fragment] from his colleague of Rheims and brought it as a gift to Bishop Manning.”

The cardinal was Désiré-Joseph Mercier (1851-1926), Archbishop of Mechelen and primate of the Roman Catholic Church in Belgium. While the Germans were shelling Reims in 1914, they were also wreaking havoc in Belgium. At Christmas 1914, Mercier issued a pastoral letter, “Patriotism and Endurance,” that enraged the German occupation regime. Of the letter’s impact, his biographer, Jan de Volder, writes: “With one shot, it made the cardinal the symbol of the resilience of the Belgian people within the country and outside.” For some of the war, the occupying regime kept the Cardinal under house arrest.

Mercier became a cause célèbre for the Allies. According to de Volder: “In the eyes of many Americans, [Mercier] uniquely personified the pride with which the Belgians had not succumbed to the oppressor, and his persona – and the propaganda about him – had helped to win public opinion for the Allied cause and, ultimately, to declare war on Germany.”

William Thomas Manning, then the rector of Trinity Church, was an outspoken admirer of Mercier and published several appreciations of him. 

In December 1916, Manning headlined a rally that packed Carnegie Hall to call upon the U.S. government to protest the forced labor imposed on Belgian citizens by their German occupiers. In his address, Manning acclaimed Mercier as a man:

… who has shown us the sublime power of moral witness, who at the risk of his own life and liberty has lifted up a voice that has been heard in every land, and that has made his oppressors tremble, the great Cardinal Mercier, whose name is an honor to Belgium, an honor to the Roman Catholic Church, an honor to Christianity throughout the world, and an honor to mankind.

Mercier visited the United States in the fall of 1919. He was honored as a hero in every city he visited on his six-week tour and was awarded sixteen honorary degrees. He met Manning at least twice — at the General Convention of the Episcopal Church, where Mercier gave an address, and at a small dinner in New York where Manning joined a committee to raise funds for the restoration of another architectural casualty of the war, the fifteenth-century library of the University of Louvain.

Aside from the reference in the 1965 guidebook, my research did not discover a record or report of Mercier giving the fragment to Manning. It goes unmentioned in the editions of Edward Hagaman Hall’s guidebook that were  published from 1920 to 1950. It is a curious omission, given Mr. Hall’s meticulous attention to the Cathedral’s smallest details. 

It is quite plausible that Mercier would have expressed his gratitude for Manning’s support with a tangible token of appreciation. I suggest that Manning probably kept the stone among his personal effects during his lifetime and that it was not installed in the chapel until after his death in 1949. This would explain its absence from the early editions of the guidebook and its sudden appearance in the 1965 edition.

The Chapel of St. Ambrose

The Chapel of St. Ambrose, next door to St. Martin’s, is dedicated to the people of Italy and the fourth-century bishop of Milan. Its Italian Renaissance design, by Thomas Hastings of Carrère & Hastings, diverges from the neighboring Gothic and Romanesque chapels. It has  plaster barrel vault, Corinthian columns, an alabaster altar topped by an ornate gilded reredos, and more marble than one finds in the whole rest of the Cathedral.

The chapel is the only place where natural light enters the Cathedral’s interior without the intermediation of pot-metal glass. The central window combines transparent glass with lightly-tinted panes. The pale tones of Henry Wynd Young’s flanking windows are a dramatic contrast to the vivid primary colors that dominate the Cathedral’s other windows.

The second fragment of Reims can be found in the window to the right of the altar. A pane in the window’s center contains a small fragment of brown glass approximately two inches square, reputedly from one of Reims’s shattered windows. The 1928 edition of Edward Hagaman Hall’s guidebook reports that the fragment is marked with an “R,” though this detail is difficult to see. I have not been able to determine how the artist acquired the fragment.

Left – West window, Chapel of St. Ambrose. The red arrow indicates the location of the Reims fragment. Right – Close-up of Reims fragment. Photos: Tom Fedorek

The shard of glass appears alongside a pomegranate. “The pomegranate is a symbol of eternity and fertility, because of its many seeds,” writes Gertrude Grace Sill in her handbook of Christian symbolism. Pomegranates abound in the window because the name Ambrose derives from the Greek ambrosios,“immortal.” When the fruit is depicted bursting open with its seeds visible, as it is in the window, “it becomes analogous to the Resurrection, the opening of the tomb, an allegory of hope.”

Reims Cathedral experienced a resurrection of its own in the postwar years. In her excellent article, “The Martyred Cathedral,” art historian Elizabeth Emery observes that “the publicity given the martyred cathedral expanded American knowledge of, and interest in, medieval art.” This in turn worked to the benefit of the postwar campaign to restore Reims to its prewar majesty. 

A sizable portion of the restoration’s funding came from Americans, with major donations from John D. Rockefeller, Jr.  The restored cathedral was consecrated in 1938, one year before war broke out again. The cathedral made it through World War II unscathed. On May 7, 1945, it was the site of Germany’s formal surrender to the Allies. No longer a martyr, Notre-Dame de Reims became once again the embodiment of the indomitable spirit of the French nation and people. 

Next in this series on the Cathedral’s historic stones – another seldom-noticed detail, the Ephesus Tile.

Sincere thanks to Wayne Kempton, diocesan archivist, for his kind assistance. Special thanks to Kathryn Hurwitz, archivist of Trinity Church, for conducting a search for material relating to Bishop Manning and Cardinal Mercier, and to Rob Hudson of the Rose Museum and Archives at Carnegie Hall for material relating to Manning’s rally at Carnegie Hall.

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Sources

Bloch, R. Howard. Paris and Her Cathedrals (New York: Liveright, 2022) ● Cram, Ralph Adams. “Reims Cathedral” in Yale Review, October 1918 ● Cram, Ralph Adams. “The Medieval Synthesis” in The Substance of Gothic: Six Lectures (Boston: Marshall & Jones, 1925) ● Cram, Ralph Adams. Heart of Europe (London: Macmillan, 1916) ● Emery, Elizabeth. “The Martyred Cathedral: American Interpretations of Notre-Dame de Reims in the First World War” in Medieval Art & Architecture After the Middle Ages (Newcastle-upon-Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2009) ● Hall, Edward Hagaman. A Guide to the Cathedral Church of St. John the Divine (New York: The Laymen’s Club, multiple editions 1920-1950, 1965) ● Mâle, Emile. The Gothic Image (New York: Harper & Row, 1972) ● Manning, William Thomas. “The Enslavement of Belgians: A Protest.” (Privately printed pamphlet, 1916) ● Sill, Gertrude Grace. A Handbook of Symbols in Christian Art (New York: Collier Books, 1975) ● Stoddard, Whitney. Art & Architecture in Medieval France (New York: Harper & Row, 1972) ● Volder, Jan de. Cardinal Mercier in the First World War (Leuven: Leuven University Press, 2018).