Category: Divine Stone

Solemn ceremonies have always accompanied the laying of a cornerstone. In ancient cultures, the ceremony might involve the sacrifice of animals or even humans. In early Christian churches, there was often a cavity within the stone to preserve relics of saints and martyrs. 

In the image above, St. Ambrose lays the cornerstone of the fourth-century Basilica of Martyrs in Milan, now known as the Basilica di Sant’ Ambrogio. St. Augustine recounts how Ambrose translated the relics of local martyrs to the new basilica (Confessions IX.7).

Sealed inside a copper box within the Cathedral’s cornerstone is a kind of relic – a fragment of stone or, more likely, Spanish brick, a remnant of the church where the Christian faith was first practiced in the Americas, built by Christopher Columbus on his second voyage in 1494. 

This post tells the story of how and why this object came to rest in the Cathedral’s cornerstone, followed by thoughts on how we in the 21^st century might regard this “relic.”

La Isabela

The fragment within the  cornerstone dates from the second and longest of Columbus’s four transatlantic voyages (1493-96), when he traveled to what is now Cuba, Jamaica, Puerto Rico, and the Lesser Antilles – all the while believing he was somewhere in Asia. He set out from Cadiz in September 1493 with a fleet of seventeen ships bearing more than a thousand crew along with building materials, provisions and horses. With colored pennants streaming from their masts, the galleons and caravels in the argosy would have been a stirring sight – unless you were one of the Jews whose property had been confiscated by the crown and mortgaged to fund the voyage.

Arriving at the north coast of the island of Hispaniola in late November 1493, Columbus found the small fort he had built on his first voyage burned to the ground and its occupants vanished. Sailing eastward along the coast, he came upon a site with a suitable harbor, a freshwater lake fed by neighboring mangrove swamps, fertile soil, and an abundance of timber. He set about building a fort, a church, a storehouse for provisions, huts for settlers and a stone house for himself. He named the new settlement La Isabela after the Queen of Castille. 

The church – La Iglesia de Santa Maria de la Incarnación – celebrated its first mass on the Feast of the Epiphany, January 6, 1494. Archaeological excavations conducted in the 1980s determined that the church was a “simple, single-naved, monastic-style church with a bell tower, campanario, on one side, a pattern that was to become standard throughout the Spanish frontier mission territories of the sixteenth century.” 

The church was approximately fifty feet long and thirty feet wide. The east and west facades were of limestone, the walls of tapia valenciana – rammed earth reinforced with brick, a common building material of southern Spain. The roof was thatched rather than tiled. Today, only the church’s foundations survive.

La Isabela lasted for only a few tumultuous years before it was abandoned, having been decimated by disease, famine, mutiny, quarrels among settlers and battles with the Indigenous Taínos. The surviving settlers relocated to Santo Domingo. The site remained deserted for the next four centuries and acquired a reputation for being haunted. Samuel Hazard, a historian of Santo Domingo, wrote about his visit to the site in 1872:

There was absolutely nothing to repay me for my trouble, the place possessing no natural beauty and the few ruins remaining having no particular form or meaning, being mostly covered with running vines and vegetation. With much difficulty can be made out where has originally run a small village street.

The USS Enterprise Expedition

Hazard’s book, Santo Domingo, Past and Present, was read by George Partridge Colvocoresses, a lieutenant aboard the sloop-of-war USS Enterprise as it cruised off the coast of Santo Domingo in the spring of 1891. As he recounts in his handwritten memoir:

I had seen a notice in a newspaper that it was proposed to send an expedition to the West Indies for the purpose of visiting the places associated with the voyages of Columbus and collecting any relics that might be found. This was to be done by the Latin-American Dept. of the Columbian Exposition, then preparing in Chicago for the 400th anniversary of the discovery of America. Realizing that we were quite near Isabella, I suggested to the Capt. that I be permitted to explore that region for our own satisfaction, and that so doing might possibly forestall the Enterprise having to return for that purpose. Capt. C. cordially approved.

Lt. Colvocoresses conducted an examination of the ruins of La Isabela on May 14-16, 1891, accompanied by a surgeon, a cadet, two volunteers from the Enterprise, and a local wood-cutter who was familiar with the site. The following are excerpts from the report that he submitted to the ship’s commander:

Tradition points to this little plateau as the site of the ancient city and here we found scattered at intervals various small ill-defined heaps of stones, remnants of walls built of small unhewn stones, evidently laid in mortar, pieces of old tiles and potsherds, some of the latter glazed, and fragments of broad, roughly-made bricks. There was a half-dozen or more blocks of dressed limestone that may have been part of the walls of buildings somewhat finished and permanent in character. The trees, matted roots and trailing vines overspread the ground and rendered progress slightly difficult. 

It should be stated that the piles of stones that we saw convey very little idea of the forms of the structures to which they belonged and give no indication of their uses.

We overturned all the cut blocks of stone and examined them carefully in the hope of finding some marks or dates, but without success … Of the surface remains at Isabella, it is our opinion that there is nothing of sufficient interest to be removed, except, perhaps, the few blocks of cut limestone, and there is nothing that would convey an idea of the architecture and workmanship of the buildings erected by the first settlers.

The artifacts that the expedition took from the site were not exhibited at the Columbian Exposition. How did one of them make its way to the Cathedral?

Lt. Colvocoresses’s report notes that two volunteers from the Enterprise accompanied him. One of them was Lieutenant Walter McLean. Lt. McLean had a brother in New York City, Malcolm McLean, a medical doctor. Dr. McLean was a member of St. Andrew’s Episcopal Church in Harlem, serving as its senior warden. Both brothers are identified as donors of the fragment in the available documentation. I would speculate that while Lt. McLean was assisting at La Isabela, he collected a few stones as souvenirs and later shared one with his brother, who then gifted it to the Cathedral. 

Are we sure that the stone is really from the church and not another building at La Isabela? We are not. The Colvocoresses report makes clear that the expedition could not distinguish specific building types. The details about the church were discovered decades later through meticulous archaeological investigation. 

The Columbus Quadricentennial

When the Cathedral’s cornerstone was laid on December 27, 1892, only three months had passed since the October 12 kick-off of the year-long commemoration of the quadricentennial of Columbus’s first voyage. The exuberant celebration was impossible for New Yorkers to avoid, the jubilee so ubiquitous that it was probably inevitable that it would impinge upon the cornerstone ceremony. 

Every New Yorker attending the ceremony would have seen the patriotic banners hanging throughout the city or watched one of the parades, or enjoyed one of the musical events, such as the cantata “The Triumph of Columbus” at Carnegie Hall. They would have read flowery editorials in their newspapers and listened to bombastic oratory lionizing Columbus as the embodiment of the American spirit of quest and boldness.

Two views Columbus from New York’s 1892 Columbus celebration. Left: Columbus the great Italian navigator atop a 60-foot column in (where else?) Columbus Circle. Marble. Artist: Gaetano Russo, 1892. Photo: Brecht Bug via Flickr. Right: Columbus the apostle of Spanish Catholicism in Central Park. Bronze. Artist: Jerionimo Sunol, 1892. Photo: NYC Dept. of Parks.

Churchgoers would have heard sermons hailing the Genoese navigator as the apostle who first planted the cross of Christianity in the New World. American Catholics even launched a short-lived campaign for canonization. Rabbis delivered their own laudatory sermons, tactfully sidestepping the quadricentennial of another historic event initiated by King Ferdinand and Queen Isabela – the Alhambra Decree of 1492 that expelled the Jews from Spain. 

While New York made merry, Chicago was constructing the Columbian Exposition of 1893, a panorama of America’s progress in science and technology. The exposition’s Great White City was the dawn’s early light of what would come to be known as “the American Century,” when the United States would take its place as a world power on an equal footing with the mighty colonial empires of Europe.

Goodbye Columbus

Brilliant navigator, bold visionary, apostle of Christian civilization – that was the prevailing view of Columbus at the time the Cathedral’s cornerstone was laid. Those present at the cornerstone ceremony would have shared this view and revered the Isabela stone as a kind of relic, for Columbus himself might have touched it.

This bygone view of Columbus persisted through much of the next century. You can see it expressed in the three places his image appears in the Cathedral, all dating from the first half of the twentieth century. You will find him in the Historical Parapet, flanked incongruously by two martyrs of the English Reformation, John Wycliffe and Thomas Cranmer. He appears again in a window in the Chapel of St. James, and in the window of the nave bay devoted to American history (not pictured here).

By the time the Columbian quincentennial arrived in the postcolonial world of 1992, images like the one above had become quaint. A new generation of historians was examining the Columbus narrative from the perspective of the Indigenous peoples that he encountered. In this view, Columbus was merely the first in a series of European adventurers who inflicted slavery, brutal exploitation, and genocidal epidemics on the native peoples of the Americas, facilitated in no small part by the priests and friars who accompanied them.

With Columbus deposed from his saintly niche, how might we regard the Isabela stone today?

We might start by considering why Bishop Potter decided to place it in the cornerstone. Was it merely to capitalize on the public interest in the Columbus quadricentennial? While that may have been a factor, there is good reason to that believe that Potter had a more substantive purpose, one that had nothing to do with the glorification of Columbus himself.

From the time that he revived his predecessor’s intention to build a great cathedral in New York, Bishop Potter sought to distinguish it from the cathedrals of the Old World. He was emphatic that it should have a distinctly American character. By placing a stone from the first church in the Americas within the cornerstone, Potter was branding St. John the Divine as an American cathedral, with core values both Christian and American.

Potter was a proponent of the American value of inclusiveness, as evidenced by his long involvement with the settlement house movement that assisted recently-arrived immigrants. In his 1887 “Letter to the Citizens of New York,” he set forth his conviction that the proposed cathedral should be “a people’s church …. [whose] welcome would be for all men of whatsoever fellowship.” As an “exponent of those great religious ideas in which the foundations of the Republic were laid,” its pulpit would be open to “the strongest and most helpful minds of the age.” 

The decision to build seven chapels where immigrants could worship in their native tongues would further distinguish St. John the Divine from Old World cathedrals. Four decades later, the windows of the nave would feature representatives of the trades and professions that funded the construction of the bays rather than the lives of the saints to whom they are dedicated, as was the medieval custom. The nave’s windows thus reflect the bedrock American belief in the dignity of labor and the worth of the common man and woman. 

The day after the cornerstone was laid, the New York Times editorialized:

A building on this scale is no longer the work of a denomination; the Episcopalians are merely the initiatory force. It appeals to the whole city, without distinction of sect or religion; nay, to the whole country, for its completion in the most beautiful and splendid way reflects glory on every person who is proud to call himself an American.

Perhaps we should regard the remnant within the cornerstone not as a relic, but rather, a seed that planted in the soil of the Americas yielded a bounty far different from what the Europeans who planted it ever imagined.

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Sources

Carletta, David M. “The Triumph of American Spectacle: New York City’s 1892 Columbian Celebration” in Material Culture (Spring, 2008). ● Colvocoresses, George Partridge. The Personal Recollections of George P. Colvocoresses, v. 1, 1847-1907. Handwritten manuscript accessed via the Norwich University Archives Digital Collection. ● Deagan, Kathleen and Jose Maria Cruxent. Columbus’s Outpost Among the Taínos: Spain and America at La Isabela 1493-1498 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002). ● Moody, Michael. “Isabela Revisited” in Journal of Popular Culture (Fall, 1989). ● Moody, Michael. “Isabela Revisited” in Journal of Popular Culture (Fall, 1989). ● Ober, Frederick A. In the Wake of Columbus (Boston: D. Lothrop Co., 1893). ● “Report of Lieutenant George P. Colvocoresses to Commander G.A. Converse, USS Enterprise” in Thacher, John Boyd, Christopher Columbus: His Life, His Work, His Remains” (New York: Putnam, 1903). ● U.S. Naval History & Heritage Command. “USS Enterprise” at https://www.history.navy.mil/our-collections/photography/us-navy-ships/alphabetical-listing/e/uss-enterprise–1877-1909-0.html ● “New cathedral planned: Bishop Potter asks the city for aid,” New York Times (June 2, 1887). ● “From the First Church,” New York Times (December 23, 1892).

(This is a continuing series of articles by Tom Fedorek, Senior Guide at the Cathedral. They explore significant historic and unusual stones in the Cathedral. – RM)

The sky was crystalline and the air frigid on the Feast of St. John, December 27, 1892, the day appointed for the laying of the Cathedral’s cornerstone. But inside the vast cruciform tent on the northeast quadrant of the Cathedral’s site, warmth, illumination, and music were provided by steam radiators, Edison light bulbs, and an organ supplemented by a brass choir and harp. Above the tent, a blue silk banner bearing the arms of the Diocese of New York wafted in the breeze. The hundreds of invited guests filled the seats well before the start of the service.

All eyes were on the platform in the center of the tent. There sat the cornerstone of Quincy granite, four feet and four inches square, incised with a cross and inscribed: I.H.S. St. John’s Day, December XXVII, A.D. 1892. Alongside the stone sat a wooden mallet and beside the mallet, a trowel of gold-streaked ebony with silver mountings, crafted by Tiffany & Co. and inscribed: Behold, I lay in Zion for a foundation stone, a tried stone, a precious cornerstone, a sure foundation (Is. 28:16). 

The cables that would lower the stone into place were hanging from the derrick above. Beneath the platform, the foundation’s massive granite blocks lay atop the bedrock in anticipation of the setting of the cornerstone.

At three o’clock, the procession of three hundred clergy and dignitaries entered the tent, having donned their vestments in the old Leake & Watts orphanage building. For the next two hours, hymns were sung, psalms chanted, scripture proclaimed. Melville Fuller, Chief Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court, read the epistle. The Bishop of Albany, William Doane, preached the sermon. A seventy-voice choir sang an anthem composed especially for the occasion.

The only glitch occurred when four trustees came forward to collect the offering only to find only three alms basins at hand. The fourth trustee, undaunted, passed his silk top hat to gather the greenbacks that were then cascaded upon a golden platter atop the cornerstone. The collection totaled $20,000, an amount insufficient to cover the cost of the elaborate ceremony – a portent of the funding shortfalls that lay ahead.

The late December daylight was fading as Bishop Potter mounted the platform accompanied by J.P. Morgan, a Cathedral trustee and its most generous benefactor, David H. King, the building contractor, and architect George L. Heins (whose partner, Grant La Farge, was conspicuous by his absence).

Cement was spread on the stone. With the point of the trowel, the bishop traced a cross in the cement at each corner. The derrick then lowered the stone into place. Standing before the stone, the bishop exclaimed: “In the name of the Father, the Son, and of the Holy Ghost, Amen” – striking the stone with the wooden mallet as he named each person of the Trinity – and continuing: 

I lay the cornerstone of a church to be here builded under the name of the Cathedral Church of Saint John the Divine: and to be devoted in the service of Almighty God as a house of prayer for all people in accordance with the doctrine, discipline, and worship of the Protestant Episcopal Church in the United States of America. Other foundation can no man lay than that is laid, which is Jesus Christ.

The Harper’s Weekly account of the ceremony expressed an optimism that was doubtless shared by those who attended the ceremony:
This cathedral will not linger in completion as long as the Old World churches did … The last work on the lofty spire will probably be done before the young architects who have designed the cathedral will have advanced to middle age.

Those who went home that day confident that they would be greeting the twentieth century with a brand-new cathedral would be disappointed when it arrived eight years later, as shown by the photo below, taken a month before the turn of the century. 

The summer after the cornerstone ceremony, the excavation commenced and quickly hit springs and soft stone instead of bedrock schist. There was talk of starting over elsewhere on the site, though some feared it would be “unpropitious” now that the cornerstone was in place. The cost of the excavation absorbed the entire building fund. J.P. Morgan donated $500,000 to “get the cathedral out of the hole,” as he famously put it. Once the above-ground construction was underway, monolithic columns fractured into duoliths, funding ran dry, and workers went on strike.

Notwithstanding Harper’s prognostication, architect George Heins was already well into middle age when he died unexpectedly in 1907. His death left La Farge to struggle alone as the project, plagued by multiple setbacks, ran catastrophically over budget and behind schedule. Bishop Potter died in 1908. His funeral had to be held in the crypt because the choir was still unfinished, the crossing roofless, and the nave and transepts not even begun. His successor, David Greer, would preside over the consecration in 1911.

La Farge did not attend the consecration. Shortly afterward, he was dismissed and the original design abandoned. Today, only the kaleidoscopic marble and ceramic floors in the choir and sanctuary suggest what might have been had Heins & La Farge been able to realize their vision of a dazzling Byzantinesque interior, while passages of unfaced masonry betray the corner-cutting occasioned by evaporating funds.

Ralph Adams Cram took over from La Farge. One of his first assignments was to complete the seven chapels, of which only two were standing. He designed the Chapel of St. Martin himself and farmed out the remaining four to other architects: St. Ambrose to Carrère & Hastings; St. James, St. Boniface, and St. Ansgar to his fellow neo-Gothicist, Henry Vaughn.

The erection of the northern chapels swallowed the section of the wall with the cornerstone. Today, it sits high above the floor of the crypt of the Chapel of St. Ansgar. The stone and its inscription are only partially visible.

The crypt of St. Ansgar’s Chapel is now the organ curator’s workroom. Hardly anyone ever gets to see the cornerstone. And nobody has ever seen the very special stone hidden inside the cornerstone – the subject of the next installment in this series on the cathedral’s historic stones. 

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Special thanks to diocesan archivist Wayne Kempton for his kind assistance and to organ curator Douglass Hunt for the photo of the cornerstone.

Sources
Dolkart, Andrew S. Morningside Heights: A History of its Architecture & Development (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998). ● “The Cathedral Corner-Stone,” Harper’s Weekly (January 7, 1893). ● “Cathedral of St. John the Divine: Laying of the Corner-Stone,” The Living Church (January 7, 1893). ● “From the First Church,” New York Times (December 23, 1892). ● “The Cathedral of St. John: Its Cornerstone to be Laid Tuesday,” (December 25, 1892). ● “The Story of the Ceremony,” New York Times (December 28, 1892). ● “Laid With Costly Stones,” New York Times (December 28, 1892). ● “Great Work Well Begun,” New York Times (December 28, 1892). ● “The Cornerstone Laid: Ceremonies at the Cathedral Site,” New York Tribune (December 28, 1892). “Its Foundations Rising,” New York Times (August 13, 1895).

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A stone on stone cathedral, designed to have a 445 ft. stone tower, needs an awesome foundation. Considering the difficulties encountered as excavation began, the solution turned out to create artificial bedrock. Unlike the site of St. Luke’s Hospital across the street where solid rock lay a few feet below the surface, there were swales and striations of rock between pockets of soft shale and decomposed rock. The foundations of the Cathedral would need an engineering solution.

Irregular masses of stone, like waves interspersed with pockets of shale and clay lead to solid bedrock at depths of 20 to 45 feet below grade. They decided to concentrate excavation to the areas of the primary piers (shown in the shaded areas of the first image of this post) down to solid rock which varied between 15 and 45 ft below grade. A uniform mass of concrete filled the void.

These pits and their surrounding areas rose to elevation 100 feet above sea level, the floor level of the crypt. The setting of the granite piers would begin at that elevation. One of the pits, meant for the four large piers that would hold up the arches and subsequently the tower, reached a depth of 40 feet without hitting bedrock. Work stopped for several months contemplating a solution which included moving the Cathedral. Eventually, they excavated five more feet and bedrock showed up. Heins and Lafarge ordered core samples of 20 ft. below that level and the core showed solid rock.

The Concrete Process

The solid rock was leveled where needed and the faces roughly dressed, thoroughly cleaned with wire brushes, and washed with hoses and brooms. The rock was allowed to dry and small drippings were removed with sponges. The concrete consists of one part Portland cement, two parts sharp sand and three parts gravel (quartz gravel 1.5 to 2 in). This was mixed quite dry and was rammed by 20 lb. rammers from 10 in. layers down to 8 in. layers. When work resumed the next day the top surface received a plastered mortar of one part cement and two parts sand. The next course commenced in the same fashion. The process continued up to the desired elevation.

The magnitude of this job beginning in April 1895 was staggering with over 200 men working on it. Six steam-operated derricks and a central narrow gauge rail track centered in the area delivered the concrete bins from the two mixing locations. By August 1895 11,000 cubic yards of concrete had been laid with another 2,000 cubic yards to go.

The Cut Granite Piers Begin

Once the concrete foundations for the Cathedral reach the correct elevation, the cut granite blocks for the piers begin to arrive.

J.D. Crimmins and J.J. Hopper. were the earth and rock excavation contractors. John Peirce was the dimensional granite contractor. General William Sooy Smith of Chicago acted as the consulting engineer of the Cathedral. Sooysmith & Co., contracting engineers of New York performed the concrete work described here. Below, all the granite piers have risen to their complete height.

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• Its Foundations Rising, The New York Times, August 13, 1895
• Construction of the Foundations of the Cathedral of St. John the Divine, The Engineering Record, C. 1, v. 32, August, 10, 1895
• Cathedral Builders Puzzled, The New York Times, September 10, 1893

Cathedral Senior Guide, Tom Fedorek, has embarked on a number of articles about stones of historic and special significance that have come to and are incorporated into the Cathedral. The Magna Carta Pedestal is the first of those articles. – RM

If you stand before the high altar of St. John the Divine and look slightly to the right, there is a credence table for chalices and other accessories used in the Eucharist. Supporting the table is a shaft of three roundish stones. They are Caen stone, a light-colored, fine-grained limestone quarried in northwestern France since Roman times and used to build churches in southern England, including Canterbury Cathedral. 

The three stones were cut more than eight hundred years ago. How did they come to be at the cathedral, and why?

The Magna Carta

The shaft of stones is known as the Magna Carta Pedestal. The surrounding inscription reads:

The adjoining shaft was once a part of the high altar of the Abbey of Bury St. Edmund upon which on November 20, 1214 the barons swore fealty to each other in wresting the Great Charter from King John. It is placed here as a symbol of the political traditions, laws, and liberties which is the inheritance of the English-speaking commonwealths throughout the world.

The abbey church where the barons swore their oath was one of the largest in England with a length of five hundred feet, constructed between 1080 and 1200. It housed the shrine of St. Edmund, a ninth-century king of East Anglia martyred by invading Danes. In 1539, the church and other abbey buildings were systematically destroyed during Henry VIII’s dissolution of monasteries.

The account of the English barons swearing the oath upon the altar comes from the chronicle of Roger of Wendover, a monk at the abbey. In 1214, the barons gathered there to discuss their grievances against King John under the guise of a pilgrimage to the shrine of St. Edmund. Roger’s chronicle states:

They all swore on the great altar that, if the king refused to grant those liberties and laws, they themselves would withdraw their allegiance to him, and make war on him, till he should, by charter under his own seal, confirm to them everything they required; and finally it was unanimously agreed that, after Christmas, they should all go together to the king and demand the confirmation of the aforesaid liberties to them.

The barons met with the tyrannical King John at Runnymede on June 15, 1215. There the king agreed to the terms of the Great Charter (Magna Carta) that had been drafted in large part by the Archbishop of Canterbury, Stephen Langton. The Magna Carta and its later revisions became the foundation of English law and government. Fundamental rights granted by the charter, such as consent to taxation, protection from search and seizure, and trial by peers, were later enshrined in the Declaration of Independence, Bill of Rights, and the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which Eleanor Roosevelt called “the international Magna Carta for all men everywhere.” 

The Marquess of Bristol

An old cathedral guidebook says of the stones: “They were given to the Cathedral in 1922, with the consent of the Abbey authorities, by the Marquis of Bristol through Dr. Raphael Constantian of New York.”

Eight men have held the title of Marquess of Bristol over the past two centuries (“Marquess” is the British spelling of “Marquis). All have been members of the Hervey family (pronounced “Harvey”). The family has deep roots in Bury St. Edmunds and the surrounding region. As long ago as the seventeenth century, Herveys were members of Parliament for Bury St. Edmunds. The region encompassing Bury and the abbey’s vast land holdings are known as the Liberty of St. Edmund. In 1806, Frederick Hervey, the 1^st Marquess of Bristol, became Hereditary High Steward of the Liberty of St. Edmund and ever since, his successors have had this ceremonial role.

The Marquess who gifted the stones to the cathedral was Frederick William Fane Hervey (1863-1951), the 4^th Marquess, also known as Lord Bristol. We see him here in the uniform of a rear admiral in the Royal Navy, where he served from 1877 to 1911.

According to a report in the Bury Free Press (July 8, 1922): 

In July 1921 Lord Bristol’s Agent selected three small stones from the High Altar site, one of which bore traces of carving which showed it to be from a Gothic structure. These were packed into a wooden box by the Agent and sent to Liverpool and they subsequently arrived in New York and have been built into the Cathedral there.

The report explains that the stones were requested by Raphael Constantian, who visited Bury St. Edmunds in 1921 for the specific purpose of acquiring altar stones to be incorporated into the Cathedral of St. John the Divine. Once the stones were received in New York, Constantian responded to the Marquess:

The observance of Magna Charter Day in this country is a very significant thing. It is part of that coming to a better understanding between the Mother Country and America which is so much desired by all lovers of peace, to say nothing about all else that such a better understanding would bring in its train. We look back upon our visit to your old city with great pleasure.

Raphael Constantian

Raphael Constantian’s main connection to the cathedral appears to have been through his business, Obelisk Waterproofing Company.

Obelisk owned a technology for waterproofing stone buildings by coating the stone with paraffin wax. The technique was invented in England by Robert Caffall, who brought it to the United States.  He won renown by applying it to Cleopatra’s Needle, the ancient Egyptian obelisk in Central Park. Hence the company’s name.

Constantian was born in Armenia and trained as medical doctor in Edinburgh before emigrating to America. He became an executive at Obelisk after a chance meeting with Caffall’s son. The exact date that Obelisk began working for St. John the Divine is unclear – one source puts it in 1909 – but it was still doing so in 1925, as seen in an advertisement from that year.

His second connection to the cathedral was through William Thomas Manning and their shared concern for the welfare of Armenian Christians during the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire in the aftermath of World War I. As president of the Armenia-America Society, Constantian participated in drafting appeals to the U.S. government. Manning, then the rector of Trinity Church, was also outspoken on the issue. In 1920, they both spoke at a rally for a free Armenia held at the cathedral’s Synod House.

A third connection is Constantian’s professional relationship with Cornelius Wickersham, who steered Obelisk into some lucrative assignments. Cornelius was the son of George Woodward Wickersham, a prominent New York attorney who had served as Attorney General in the administration of William Howard Taft. The elder Wickersham was an active Episcopal layman – a vestryman of St. George’s Church, a friend and admirer of Manning, and a cathedral trustee involved with the fund-raising campaign for the nave. His grandson, George W. Wickersham II, would later be installed as a canon of the cathedral.

It is unclear if the idea for a Magna Carta Pedestal originated with Constantian, but he was clearly the principal actor in making the idea a reality. He is presumed to have provided the funding, as well, perhaps in gratitude for Manning’s advocacy for the cause of a free Armenia, or as a good will gesture towards a longtime customer of his company.

Magna Carta Day

During Manning’s episcopate, the cathedral conducted a special service annually on Magna Carta Day, June 15, or the Sunday following. He was an Englishman by birth, a native of Northampton. The commemoration of the document that was the foundation for so many of the liberties enjoyed by both Britons and Americans had a deep meaning for him.

When the Magna Carta Pedestal was dedicated on Sunday, June 18, 1922, George Wickersham spoke at the service of the document’s continuing relevance:

The greater freedom from oppression which the English-speaking peoples of the world have enjoyed over all other peoples has been because from the thirteenth century to the present time they have held fast to the guiding principles embodied in the charter of John. Today they are expressed in the written Constitution of the American Commonwealth as limitations imposed by the people upon their government … 

So let us be thankful for the vision of liberty which the men of 1215 possessed and rejoice in the stable institutions of our day by means of which the aspirations of Runnymede have become the accepted liberties of the free English-speaking commonwealths of the twentieth century.

The phrase “English-speaking commonwealths” also appears in the pedestal’s inscription, suggesting that Wickersham participated in drafting it.

The 1941 observance of Magna Carta Day must have been fraught with emotion for the bishop. Only a few weeks earlier, the Luftwaffe had paused the Blitz, the eight-month campaign of incessant nighttime bombing of English cities that had left more than 40,000 civilians dead and more than two million homes destroyed or damaged. More than 3,000 British aviators had died defending their country. St. Paul’s Cathedral, Westminster Abbey, and the Houses of Parliament had been bombed. Coventry Cathedral had been destroyed.

After leading a solemn procession to the Magna Carta Pedestal, the bishop read from the inscription: “It is placed here as a symbol of the community of political tradition, laws, and liberties, which is the inheritance of the English-speaking commonwealths throughout the world.” 

Placing his hand on the shaft, he continued: “In the presence of God and by this time-honored stone we swear anew our loyalty to the free gospel of Christ. With God’s assistance we will safeguard our liberties and transmit them unsullied to the generations yet unborn.”

My sincere thanks to John Saunders, Adrian Tindall, and Patricia Mackie of the Bury Past & Present Society for tracking down the information about the acquisition of the stones. 

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Sources: Giles, J.A. (translator). Roger of Wendover’s Flowers of History (London: H.G. Bohn, 1892) ● Hall, Edward H. A Guide to the Cathedral Church of St. John the Divine, 15^th ed., 1950 ● Jones, Dan. Magna Carta: The Birth of Liberty (New York: Viking, 2014) ● Wright, Milton. “Staying the hand of time,” Scientific American, August, 1931 ● “Manning would re-open war to free Armenia,” New York Times, March 1, 1920 ● “Cathedral service for Magna Carta,” New York Times, June 19, 1922 ● “Magna Carta Day held at St. John’s,” New York Times, June 16, 1941 ● “The Marquess of Bristol” (obituary), Times of London, October 25, 1951 ● Bury Free Press, July 8, 1922.

For over a decade, I documented the crew at the Stoneyard at The Cathedral of St. John the Divine. I always stayed behind the camera, capturing the work done by the skilled apprentices, artisans and laborers who created extraordinary works in stone and started to build a tower.

As I began digitizing my slides and negatives 12 years ago, I realized I had scant few images of myself to show – a self-portrait, the back of my head while I was photographing on the tower and a single photo of me photographing a stone carver and his work.

Recently, while also editing and digitizing a few boxes of slides and prints from the Cathedral archives, I came across a treasure trove of images capturing me working on the tower and photographing daily events during the building phase of the 1980s and early 1990s. I found these images in folders organized by Barbara C. Timken, an architectural historian, who was the Stoneyard Institute coordinator and Director of Educational Programs from 1986 – 1988.

Perhaps this is a good time to reflect on my time documenting such a magical era at the Cathedral.

The Beginning

I first read about the Stoneyard Institute from a Daily News article, and I was attracted to the idea of the medieval traditions of stonecutting coming to life in the City. In the pre-email days, I wrote to Dean James Parks Morton who invited me to come by for a meeting. Sitting in his huge cluttered office, its every surface covered with artwork and papers, I was in awe. I explained that I wanted to make a record of this project and he essentially told me “it’s yours.”

It’s Yours

– James Parks Morton

At the time, I worked full time as a photographer for Gannett Newspapers,  but a crazy schedule of days, nights and weekends allowed me to stop by the Stoneyard for an hour or two before going in for a night shift, or spend most of the weekday if I was working the weekend. It also helped that I lived on Cathedral Parkway, so I was only a few blocks away from the Stoneyard.

My responsibility on this project, as I saw it, was to record the work in the most objective way. Stay behind the camera and let the work unfold. In a very short time Jose Tapía, James Jamerson, Arlene “Poni” Baptiste and Tim Smith, among others, would totally forget I was there and I could capture true candid moments while they worked.  I also learned more about them since I started coming by regularly with many friendships developing, and many remaining to this day. I remember lunch at Tom’s Restaurant with Cynie Linton, Halloween parties at The Deanery, summer barbeques featuring Sylvia’s fried chicken and crying at Ruben Gibson’s funeral.

Dedication of the South Tower

Most of the time, I could visit the Stoneyard, shoot a few rolls of film and move on. However, other times I had to come up with a plan to photograph a special event.

The first major occasion was the tower dedication on Sept. 29, 1982, when the cornerstone of St. Paul’s tower was set and blessed by Bishop Paul Moore. I had to assess the logistics of photographing from one of two vantage points – Amsterdam House that faced the Cathedral or from the Cathedral tower. Where would I get the best shots of Philippe Petit walking across Amsterdam Avenue on a high wire since I couldn’t be in two places at once…or could I?

I checked the roof of Amsterdam House and saw that Philippe’s wire was set and there would be a dramatic view of him walking with the Cathedral in the background. I also realized the more important images – the actual blessing of the cornerstone and capturing the expressions on Philippe’s face — could only be done from the tower side. Time was tight so I left a camera on a tripod with an external shutter on the roof of Amsterdam House and asked a photographer next to me if she would hit the button a few times when Philippe started his walk. A chance I had to take, I felt, as I raced across the street and to the top of the St. Paul’s tower before the ceremony began. 

Clearly, I was at the right spot to capture a jubilant Philippe kneeling on the wire and raising his hand in a dramatic moment. From there I could easily turn around and record the setting and blessing of the first stone on the narrow space in front of the cornerstone. At one point, while Philippe was crossing Amsterdam Avenue, I must have blocked a photo Master Mason Stephen Boyle was trying to take. Instead of a nice pic of Philippe walking across on the wire, Stephen wound up with a photo of the back of my head with Philippe seemingly off in the distance. Stephen kindly gave me his photo as a souvenir, which I have added to my digital archive.

After the ceremony, I returned to Amsterdam House to retrieve my camera. Once the slide film was processed, I saw that the photographer had indeed pushed the shutter a few times and I had a spectacular image of Philippe walking toward the Cathedral, suspended over 100 feet above Amsterdam Avenue. I was equally surprised (and delighted) to get a call the next day from Newsweek magazine which published my photo. I also had a front-page photo and a few others in the Gannett newspaper, The Journal News.

The Bell Tower

Another scheduled event that required careful planning was the bell frame installation, which occurred over the weekend of September 3-4, 1988. I had scoped out a few nearby buildings where I could access the roofs to get different angles as the steel I-beams were hoisted from a street level crane to the top of the tower. I spent the better part of the weekend on the street, up on the tower and on nearby rooftops to record the moment. 

Once again, Stephen Boyle was on the tower that weekend with his camera and he managed to grab a photo of me walking around the limestone blocks as the steelworkers bolted the I-beams into place. Another photo for my collection.

My battered Domke bag was crammed with the usual array of Nikon equipment but on occasion, I had to add some special tools to get the job done – ultra wide-angle lenses and cameras and perceptive control (PC) lenses. 

Light and Shadow

I loved working with light and shadows to capture progress photos of the Cathedral façade as the tower began to rise. To keep the lines straight and undistorted I used a PC lens that enabled me to shift the axis of the lens to keep architectural lines straight and not tilting at awkward angles. The result was beautiful images as the setting sun cast moody shadows on the West front with the tower rising into a deep blue sky. 

Photographing on the tower was a challenge mainly because there was so little room to back up, and I certainly did not want to take one step too many off the wooden planks surrounding the stonework. I sometimes needed the help of ultra-wide and full-frame fisheye lenses to get sufficient distance between the subjects – the stone setters — and me as they were setting the stones. This was especially true while I photographed the tower crew working on the string course. I literally had to crouch low on a wooden plank off the side of the tower to show the bizarre yet beautiful faces and elaborately carved foliage as the masons set the stones into place. 

As I mentioned, until recently I had one photo of me photographing at the Stoneyard. It was a small Kodak print and I could not recall who gave it to me. While scanning a folder from Barbara C. Timken marked “People,” I found the original slide and a few others. Her image shows me photographing D’Ellis “Jeep” Kincannon’s St. Phoebe apex gablet finial, with Jeep also photographing his stone from a different angle.

Barbara also recorded images tracing the carving as it was delivered to the tower and then set into place. Along the way, Barbara turned her camera in my direction a few times, so now I had some new photographs of my working on the tower. 

Barbara was on the scene with her camera another time, when I was setting up a group photo of the Stoneyard crew and the summer architectural program on the tower. I had to climb over the scaffolding and out onto the edge of the planks, to get the angle I needed. That memory came back in a jolt when I found another of Barbara’s many folders with images she had captured that day. Not only did she have photos of me holding onto the scaffold with one hand as I directed people to get closer, but the photo also showed the very short shorts I was wearing that day.

Work on the Tower Slowed

Gradually, things changed. Work slowed down on the tower as funding dried up and Dean Morton tried to keep things afloat with Cathedral Stoneworks. In addition, for me, a new job (Monday through Friday) and the birth of my son Evan left little time to photograph at the Stoneyard.

Within a few years, all work had stopped and the rusting hulk of the scaffold enveloped the stump of a tower. Many years later, the scaffold and upright bell frame beams came down — a clear indication there would be no more work on the tower in my lifetime. My dream of photographing the last pinnacle set in place would never happen.

My body of work – several hundred rolls of films and slides (in the pre-digital age) – languished on a bookshelf until I found myself out of work in 2013. The down time gave me the opportunity to put my collection in order and complete the job I had started decades earlier by putting everything in digital form. As a photojournalist, I knew the job was more than gathering a series of photographs together – I had to tell a complete story with each image. Clear captions with accurate details were my mantra, and I give special thanks to Stephen Boyle for his never-ending patience as I bombarded him with questions on technical terms, types of stone and crewmembers’ names. With his help, my collection comes close to 2,000 images.

Things are coming full circle since I took my first photos at the Stoneyard 45 years ago. With my images, I have contributed numerous stories to Divine Stone and I have done a number of presentations on the magnificent carvings on the tower. (I even hope to turn that project into a children’s version.) Perhaps a book in the future?

Recalling my first meeting with Dean Morton, when I explained I wanted to make a record of this project, I see that I am still working on this task. Only now, I am pushing it forward for future generations.  

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