Category: Divine Stone

Johno Verity visits the Portal of Paradise, one of his father’s major works

Wearing his trademark pink wool hat, Johno Verity tells his TikTok followers that he is biking through Central Park at 5:45 a.m. “My first stop on this trip to New York City,” he says, “was to the Cathedral of St. John the Divine to view a piece of sculpture that took my father, Simon Verity, 13 years** to finish — the Portal of Paradise.” 

Taking in the 32 carved limestone biblical figures based on iconography developed by Cathedral architect Ralph Adams Cram and Bishop William Manning in 1925, Johno exclaims, “Look at this thing – it is massive. Wallop!” Some details, including adding a number of biblical women, were finalized by Dean James Park Morton and a committee before actual work started in 1988.

This is Johno’s first visit to New York and to the Cathedral since his father, Master Sculptor Simon Verity, passed away last year. “It’s just amazing to come back here and to see it. It reminds me of being in my late teens, my early 20s and then also of my dad who died last year of dementia.” Link to obit Simon Verity – Master Sculptor (1945-2024) – Divine Stone

Johno Verity is a videographer with a TikTok page that focuses on offbeat London history for his 32,000+ followers. He recalls, “I first came to visit my father in New York back in 1989 when I was 13. I would return each year and watch its (the Portal of Paradise) progress as well as the team he’d built to work on it. The thing I loved the most were the elements of his life that he immortalized in stone. He had local people and friends pose for the carvings.” 

As a teenager visiting his father, Johno admits he was more interested in skateboarding down the railings in front of the Cathedral than in his father’s work. He was also an avid BMX biker from age 15 and his father introduced Johno to photographer Martha Cooper, who would go around the city with him to various skate parks and ramps to photograph Johno on his Motorcross bike – a small bike used for short bursts of speed and performing stunts. 

Surveying the completed Portal of Paradise, Johno says, “He had quite a few people that were assisting him carving this and he gave these lower pieces (the pedestals) to the assistants (Cathedral apprentice and journeymen carvers) to put their mark on.”

One pedestal that stands out to Johno is Joseph Kincannon’s “depiction of New York as the New Babylon the Great, illustrating the end of days. Though it was carved in the 90s, years before 9/11 (Sept. 11, 2001), there’s been some controversy over it because it’s depicting what looks like it’s celebrating the fall of the towers, although obviously there’s no way it could have been.”

A Cathedral visitor’s guide clarifies that Joseph Kincannon’s carving shows New York City, including the Twin Towers, portrayed under a mushroom cloud, interpreting the modern day destruction of Jerusalem. The Gothic arches represent the rebuilding of the “cathedral,” a symbol of hope after chaos.

On the south side of the Portal, Johno points up to “the lady in the green dress,” the upper-rank figure of Esther. The same Cathedral brochure explains that Esther, a beautiful Jewish woman, was chosen by the Persian king Ahasuerus to be his wife.  Esther overhears an evil court official, Haman, plotting to kill the King and massacre the Jews. Esther and her cousin Mordecai warned the King, thus thwarting his assassination. The Feast of Purim commemorates the deliverance of the Jews.

But, Johno’s story goes beyond the historical.

The woman who posed for Simon’s carving of Esther is Jessica (Johno can’t recall her last name) and “she’s got a dog called Cooper.” The dog walked into some of Simon’s photos while he was preparing some modeling and drapery studies. Johno adds, “that dog was an absolute nightmare, it loved Jessica but was freaked out by everyone else.”

At that time Martha Cooper, a New York City photojournalist and author, was photographing the work on the portal so, as a nod to Cooper the dog and Cooper the photographer, Simon carved the dog with a camera around its neck.

Another canine of note on the Portal appears with the far right upper-rank figure on the north side. The figure of Noah is carved as the seventh Dean of the Cathedral, The Very Rev. James Parks Morton, who was a life-long student of architecture and led the Cathedral’s third building phase. Dean Morton faces toward the Cathedral while holding the unfinished ark. His Welsh Corgi, Pepe, is seen at his feet, seemingly interacting with a small carved dragon on a nearby ledge.

Another nearby upper-rank carving depicts the biblical figure Deborah, a prophetess and judge. As a judge, she dispensed wisdom and resolved legal and political disputes. Deborah joined with Barak, the military leader, to overthrow the tyrant Sisera. Forty years of peace followed. Pamela Morton, wife of Dean Morton, known for her patience and good judgment, served as the model for this sculpture.

Johno, observing the colorful upper-rank figures, says, “I find it interesting that he chose to paint them. Most people didn’t realize it was a practice they did a thousand years ago. It could seem like sacrilege to change the natural color of the stone.”  

Only the figures in the top level of the Portal were painted, the colors coming from metallic oxides ground to a fine powder. The base of the paint is casein, a protein that derives from milk and is very much in line with the medieval tradition, when all the church sculptures were painted, according to Tom Fedorek, a Cathedral docent.

Seated on the steps below the Portal, Johno reflects on his visit and his father’s illness.

“I think because he died of dementia,” Johno thinks back, “those last couple of years I found him incredibly difficult because I saw him changing from the man he once was and that’s so difficult to deal with. And I was really worried that I would forget the memory of what he was like when he was fine.”  

Because of the disease “he stopped being the person he once was and coming here it just reminds me of how he was back then. He was brilliant, he was fun, he was cheeky, he had a sparkle in his eye, really, and it’s great to be here to witness that again.”

Pausing to look up the carvings, Johno says, “I see (the work) in a different light now to how I used to observe. When he was alive it was just a piece of his work; it was something he had done. I guess it really didn’t conjure up any real emotions; whereas now, since he’s died, it definitely brings these emotions of missing him. And also, what’s really important for me is it brings back a time in his life when he was completely fine.”

Johno adds, “What’s changed now from what it was is that it’s now a memory of him — because he died. It used to be just a piece of his work — this is a kind of lasting memory of mine.” 

NOTE: According to Cathedral records, the Portal of Paradise was carved between 1988 and 1997.

■

Sources: Johno Verity, Johno Verity (@johnoverity) | TikTok 

Portal of Paradise: A Guide to the Sculptures, Cathedral of St. John the Divine

A pale, chalky block of limestone sits on the floor of the Chapel of St. Martin in the Cathedral of St. John the Divine. This is the story of where it came from, how it came to the Cathedral, who brought it there, and why it is an historic stone.

Behind and above the stone, a marble sculpture of St. Joan of Arc stands flush against the wall. Joan folds her hands in prayer. Her contemplative expression suggests that though her body is armored for battle, her mind is far away from the battlefield.

Perhaps she is listening for the voice of the archangel Michael, which she first heard as a child, as depicted in the window across from the sculpture.

Joan lived her last five months in a tower of the Château de Rouen, or Rouen Castle, held in chains while a rigged ecclesiastical court convicted her on charges of idolatry, heresy, and sorcery. There she spent her final hours before her execution.

The stone on the chapel’s floor was once part of this tower, now known as the Tour de la Pucelle (the Maid’s Tower). 

Rouen Castle

Rouen Castle was built amid the conflict over control of the rich lands that would become the modern nation of France

In the twelfth century, most of western France was under the control of England’s Plantagenet kings (Henry II, Richard I, and John). In 1200, French forces under King Philip II, also known as Philip Augustus, began retaking the Plantagenet territory.

Once he had retaken Normandy, Philip built a massive castle in Rouen, the region’s principal city, as a defense against a return of the English. The castle, constructed between 1204 and 1210, had ten towers and was surrounded by a moat. Its round towers were the latest thing in castle building. According to Philip’s biographer: “No one contributed more to the introduction of round towers in castle design … Round towers, which were better designed to prevent damage from throwing engines or mining than rectangular towers, were the design of the future for castle architecture.”

Beginning in 1337, English and French forces fought one another in what became known as the Hundred Years War. In 1419, Henry V of England took Rouen after a six-month siege. He fortified the castle to withstand artillery fire and made it the base for his further campaigns. The English, in an alliance with the Duke of Burgundy, soon controlled much of northern France. 

It was the regime of Henry V and his son, Henry VI, that Joan of Arc sought to overthrow. After some initial successes on the battlefield, she was captured by the Burgundians, sold to the English, and held at Rouen Castle from December 23, 1430, until her martyrdom on May 30, 1431. 

The illustration above identifies two of the towers. Joan’s prison cell was in the smaller tower, the Tour de la Pucelle.

The donjon, the large central tower, was the castle keep. It is the only part of the castle to survive its demolition, which began in the late sixteenth century. Today, the donjon is a tourist attraction known as the Tour Jeanne d’Arc. Joan is known to have been in the donjon only once, to be threatened with instruments of torture.

The Tour de la Pucelle survived the demolition, at least in part, until the early nineteenth century. The illustration below, from the Bulletin des Amis des Monuments Rouennais (1910), gives 1809 as the date of its demolition. 

The tower’s foundations remained in place until 1912, when a developer began to excavate the site to build an office building, as seen below:

Today, there is a plaque and relief carving of Rouen Castle above the modest entrance to the office building at 102 Rue Jeanne d’Arc. Inside, one may view a few stones from the foundations along with the remains of a well that once provided water for the tower.

102 Rue Jeanne d’Arc in Rouen, exterior and interior. Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

How did a stone from the Tour de la Pucelle make its way from Rouen’s Place de la Pucelle to New York’s Amsterdam Avenue?  Enter the members of the Joan of Arc Statue Committee.

The Joan of Arc Statue Committee

In 1909, a small group of civic-minded New Yorkers formed the Joan of Arc Statue Committee with the intention of raising a public monument to mark the quincentennial of Joan’s birth. (While there is no written record of Joan’s birth date, a long tradition has it as the Feast of the Epiphany, January 6, 1412.) The committee’s efforts would result in an equestrian statue of Joan on Manhattan’s Riverside Drive and, later, the sculpture in St. Martin’s Chapel.

The idea for a monument to Joan may have originated with John Sanford Saltus (1854-1922), the committee’s honorary president and primary source of funding for both statues. 

Saltus (1854-1922) was a classic Gilded Age character. Heir to a steel fortune, he was a gentleman scholar, a connoisseur and patron of the arts, the sponsor of a fencing team, and a bon vivant with a passion for masquerade balls where his elaborate costumes always won first prize. A Francophile, Saltus had an abiding fascination with Joan of Arc, which he pursued by commissioning statues of her for cities in the United States and Europe. 

It was Saltus who brought sculptor Anna Vaughn Hyatt to the committee’s attention. (This article identifies the sculptor by the name with which she signed her work prior to 1923, when she married Archer Huntington and became Anna Hyatt Huntington.) 

The committee’s president and secretary were George Frederic Kunz (1856-1932) and Edward Hagaman Hall (1858-1936). Hall was a former journalist turned historian and preservationist. Kunz was an eminent mineralogist and Tiffany & Co.’s chief advisor on gemology. Kunz and Saltus were both active in the American Numismatic Society, where Kunz was a member and Saltus, a major benefactor. 

Kunz and Hall were frequent collaborators. They were both officers of the American Scenic and Historic Preservation Society. They had worked together to plan the Hudson-Fulton Celebration of 1909. In addition, Kunz and Hall were both officers of the Laymen’s Club of St. John the Divine. The guidebooks that Hall wrote for the Cathedral, and continuously updated, are still essential resources for anyone with an interest in its art and iconography

The Statue and the Stone

As the Statue Committee considered the form that the monument might take, Anna Hyatt was working in Paris on a sculpture of Joan that would become the basis for the bronze equestrian statue that now overlooks Riverside Drive at West 93^rd Street. 

It may have been destined that Hyatt (1876-1973) would become a renowned sculptor of animals, for her mother was an artist and her father a professor of zoology at Harvard University. 

Hyatt studied sculpture at the New York’s Art Students League with Gutzon Borglum, among other instructors, and spent many days at the Bronx Zoo observing the anatomy of animals. In 1906 she traveled to Paris, where she worked on animal subjects for the next four years.

In 1910, she exhibited her equestrian statue of Joan of Arc at the prestigious annual exhibition known as the Salon. The following account of the work is from the catalog for an exhibition of her sculpture at Columbia University’s Wallach Art Gallery:

Anna Hyatt Huntington told stories about her long search for the perfect horse. Candidates were rejected because they were too small or too delicate. Finally, the artist found one massive enough … The monumental sculpted horse she exhibited at the 1910 Paris Salon was indeed astonishingly large. It proved, however, to be only an accessory to its rider, Joan of Arc. Clad in armor from head to toe, she rose from her steed to raise a weapon to heaven … Despite the Salon jury’s doubts about whether she could have executed the life-size sculpture all by herself, they awarded her an honorable mention.

J. Sanford Saltus saw Hyatt’s work at the Salon and recommended her to the Statue Committee, which commissioned her to proceed in 1913. The finished work follows its antecedent closely with some minor alterations. To ensure historical accuracy, Hyatt studied the armor in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Hyatt’s niece, Clara Hunter Hyatt, posed for the figure of Joan astride a barrel that stood in for the horse. The fire department of Gloucester, Massachusetts provided a horse to model for the magnificently muscular steed carrying Joan into battle.

Architect John van Pelt was commissioned to design the statue’s base of Mohegan granite from a quarry in Yorktown, New York. The same quarry supplied much of the granite for St. John the Divine, as Roger Murphy explains elsewhere on the Divine Stone site: https://divinestone.org/blog/mohegan-golden-granite/ 

Meanwhile in Rouen, builders were laying plans to construct an office building on the site of the Tour de la Pucelle. By this time, only the tower’s foundations were intact. When the news reached Kunz in 1912, he contacted the owners of the property. 

The property owners put Kunz in touch with Jean de Beaurepaire, who was conducting an archaeological survey of the site prior to demolition. Beaurepaire was a nephew of Charles Robillard de Beaurepaire, an eminent historian of Rouen and the author of a study of Joan’s heresy trial. Beaurepaire ultimately salvaged many of the stones and arranged for 229 limestone blocks to be shipped to New York in 1914. 

Some of the stones – it is unclear how many – were incorporated into the statue’s base. The base also incorporates a stone from Reims Cathedral, where Joan stood alongside Charles VII at his coronation as the rightful king of France. The finished base bears an inscription with the particulars of Joan’s birth and death. On the day I stopped by, a previous visitor had adorned the base with a rose of red,  the liturgical color of martyrdom.

At least one of the stones from Rouen made its way to St. John the Divine. In the Cathedral’s archives, I came across a copy of the committee’s press release for the dedication of the statue in 1915. At the bottom of the page is a handwritten note from Hall to a Mr.  Nash (presumed to be Rev. E. Briggs Nash, the Cathedral’s Canon Sacrist 1914-1921):  “Would the Cathedral like to have one of these JOA stones for the floor of the French chapel?”

The Cathedral apparently agreed to the offer, because in December 1915, Kunz sent a typewritten letter to Dean William Grosvenor confirming the stone’s authenticity, stating: 

It will be a most interesting object in the French chapel, either in its natural condition or worked up into the pedestal of the statue of the Maid which, I understand, is sometime to adorn one of the niches of the arch.

Kunz added a postscript in his own hand: “Dr. Hall will select the finest piece that we have suitable for your purposes.”

The historic stone in St. Martin’s Chapel preceded the statue of Joan by six years. It was not until May 1921 that the Cathedral’s Committee on the Fabric received a letter from Kunz, who wrote on behalf of the Statue Committee to offer a gift of a sculpture of Joan for the chapel, “the statue to take the form of a kneeling figure facing one of the walls of the chapel.”

Hyatt was retained to create the sculpture, which she completed in 1922. The posture and placement proposed by Kunz was reconsidered after consultation with architect Ralph Adams Cram. This time Hyatt’s model was Renee Weill, a dancer with the ballet troupe of Michel Fokine. Joan’s face is Hyatt’s  idealization. The idea of incorporating the stone into the statue’s base was abandoned in favor of leaving it be, though with one corner slightly chiseled down.

The roughly-cut stone – such a contrast to the chapel’s sleek stone surfaces – may be the closest we will ever come to having a tangible connection to Joan’s earthly life. Due to the nature of her death, there are no genuine relics of Joan’s person. Strictly speaking, the stone probably does not qualify as a relic. There is no evidence that Joan ever touched it or that the randomly-selected stone was once in her cell (as the chapel’s signage has it).

Nevertheless, some visitors sense an aura of holiness around the stone. It affects not only the faithful but even the irreligious. When I bring visitors to the chapel and explain the stone’s significance, they are often visibly moved. Some reach out to touch it, as medieval pilgrims might have done in the presence of a sacred object.

Six hundred years after her death, Joan’s story continues to fascinate, judging from the torrent of historical, novelistic, artistic, dramatic, and cinematic works about her. There are still many who might agree with the opinion expressed by Mark Twain, one of her greatest admirers, that Joan of Arc was “easily and by far the most extraordinary person the human race has ever produced.”

Thanks to diocesan archivist Wayne Kempton for access to the archival sources consulted for this article.

■

Sources

Publications: Butler, Declan. “Joan of Arc’s relics exposed as forgery, Nature, April 5, 2007 ● Bradbury, Jim. Philip Augustus: King of France 1180-1223 (London: Longman, 1998)  ● Farmer, David Hugh. The Oxford Dictionary of Saints (New York: Oxford University Press, 1978) ● Higonnet, Anne. Goddess, Heroine, Beast: Anna Hyatt Huntington’s New York Sculpture (New York: Columbia University Press, 2014) ● Sypher, Francis J., Jr. Strangers & Pilgrims: A Centennial History of the Laymen’s Club (New York: The Laymen’s Club, 2012)  ● Twain, Mark. Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1989) ● “Joan of Arc Statue Here,” New York Times, December 8, 1922. Digital Sources: Donjon de Rouen site https://www.donjonderouen.com/histoire/ ● NYC Department of Parks & Recreation site https://www.nycgovparks.org/parks/riverside-park/monuments/819  ● Newman Numismatic Portal – Saltus bio https://nnp.wustl.edu/library/PersonDetail/1702  ● Salmagundi Club – Saltus bio https://salmagundi.org/comedy-and-tragedy-the-life-of-john-sanford-saltus/  ● Les secrets de Jeanne site https://www.jeannedomremy.fr/  ●Syracuse University – Anna Hyatt Huntington Papers http://library.syr.edu/digital/guides/h/huntington_ah.htm  Cathedral Archives: Joan of Arc Statue Committee Press release, December 4, 1915, and dedication pamphlet, December 6, 1915 ● Letter from George Kunz to Dean Grosvenor, December 13, 1915.● Letter from George Kunz, May 24, 1921. ● Letter to Dean Morton re model for Joan of Arc statue, February 27, 1990. ● Minutes of the Committee on the Fabric 1915-1922.

Mark Saxe was as good a friend to the stone cutters, carvers and fixers at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine as there could be. He had a powerful belief that their unique work deserved recognition in a tangible form. To that end, he recruited me some six years ago to help. He coined the title Divine Stone for the project and the divinestone blog was created to showcase the research, let the men and women who worked on the Cathedral know that their story was emerging and would hopefully lead to a published manuscript. Since then, Mark and I have shared many a conversation about the work and the people in that “Dean Morton” stoneyard. I am working on that manuscript along with the many contributors to Divinestone. We have been blessed to team up with Robert F. Rodriguez as co-author providing his stories as well as his wonderful images.

Mark’s passing has brought forth many tributes from sculptors and artists and people who knew him. He was my friend for the last 19 years and my stone carving teacher for the last 10 years. I will miss so many things about him, nothing more so than the Sunday lunches we shared in his stone yard.

Mark was born in Chelsea, Massachusetts, the grandson of Jewish immigrants from Odessa, Ukraine. He served in the U.S. Army in Vietnam and was honorably discharged in 1968. As a soldier, he had written poetry, but as a veteran he felt that words failed him. Wandering around Europe, it was the carved stone of the cathedrals and monuments that seemed to him a kind of medicine, calming and focusing his energy and imagination away from war and towards the miracle of creation. He went on to receive his MFA on the GI Bill from the Institute Allende in Mexico, followed by a three-year apprenticeship with a stonemason in Massachusetts, before setting up shop in Dixon, NM.

Mark established Southwest Stoneworks in 1979, specializing in architectural stonework and historic stone restoration. Over the decades, he earned a lasting reputation for exceptional work among architects, building contractors, and northern New Mexico’s rich mix of residents.

Mark told me that he traveled to several stone carving workshops around the country to learn more about the techniques of carving. On those trips, he met Kazutaka Uchida of Japan who had a profound impact on Mark. At a workshop in Vermont he met Fred X. Brownstein, who had studied extensively in Italy. Both of these sculptors became important to Mark’s future workshops, sharing their extensive knowledge, depth of thought, aesthetic sensibilities and friendship. When Mark returned from that Vermont trip the idea that he could bring these world-class instructors to his stone yard, put on a workshop, learn more himself and not have to travel took shape. In 2001, Mark realized a long-held dream in founding Sax Stone Carving Workshops. (Sax is Latin for stone.) The first guest instructor was Patrick Plunkett, stone carver at the National Cathedral in Washington, D.C. from 1975 to 1988, and was superintendent of stone restoration at the White House. Nicholas Fairplay and Joseph Kincannon, carvers from the Cathedral of St. John the Divine, were frequent instructors. Always generous in sharing his knowledge and love of stone, Mark deepened and expanded the reach of his chosen field and attracted a devoted family of stone carvers. It was during the 25th Annual Stonecarving Workshop that Mark passed away peacefully at his home in nearby Ojo Sarco.

“It is said that there is no one who is not better off for having spent time in the presence of stone. With that as our guiding belief, we keep chipping away. Working with stone is never time wasted.”

– Mark Ian Saxe

In 2023, Mark received the Governor’s Award for Excellence in the Arts, recognizing his profound impact on the community both as a sculptor and a teacher. As a sculptor, he found in stone a world where stories and emotions could unfold, a realm where the known and the mysterious could converge. Whether a 15-ton monolith of Washington State basalt or a few pounds of Indiana limestone, his pieces contain a quiet grandeur.

Always humble and humorous, he was interviewed about his work by videographer Christopher Roybal upon being notified of the Governor’s Award. In this short video, Mark sums up his approach to a lifetime of working with stone. Please CLICK HERE TO WATCH

While working on a project with Santa Fe architect, John Barton, Mark got a chance to visit the stoneyard at the Cathedral. Some years later, he wrote this essay for Divine Stone:

In His Own Words

“My connection to the stoneyard began in the late 1980’s when John Barton, AIA, the son-in-law of the Dean of the Cathedral, James Parks Morton, invited me to see the stone working program. I was offered a place to stay in the Bishop’s guest quarters and visited the stone shed attached to the Cathedral several times. 

“John introduced me to the cutters and carvers. I remember no names, only the intensity and dedication that showed in the faces. It was likely that I met Jose Tapia, Tim Smith and Eddie P. They were working…cutting and carving some of the thousands of stones necessary to complete the Cathedral’s towers. I wished I was one of them, but it was not to be, living in New Mexico with a stone masonry business that needed me and I needed it. However, my connection to the stoneyard has continued since that tour.

I would have traded places with any one of them

– Mark Saxe

“The light filtering down from the skylights, the fine dust of limestone in the air and the tap, tap, tap of hammer on chisel was mesmerizing. The vibe was intoxicating, especially to me who had already spent the last 13 years working with stone. I would have traded places with any of those carvers but I had a home and business to take care of. Upon leaving the Cathedral I had a feeling that we would meet again in the future. That experience had a profound effect on me and because of it I met many people who worked on the Cathedral, most notably Joseph Kincannon, Nick Fairplay, and John Barton. All of them have added to my life and work.” – Mark Saxe

Mark is survived by his wife, Betsy Willams, professional artist and ceramist. Betsy is the Co-Director of the Sax Stone Carving Workshops. Betsy plans on continuing Mark’s legacy and all he has established with the workshops. The website, Sax Stone Carving, will indicate dates and information for the 26th Annual Workshop when they are available.

■

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

Set in the floor in front of the high altar of St. John the Divine is a salmon-colored marble slab, fourteen inches square, known as the Ephesus Tile. Surrounding the stone, this inscription:

Whosoever shall have prayed at this spot will have pressed with his feet a tile from the ancient church of St. John the Divine at Ephesus built by the Emperor Justinian in the year DXL over the traditional site of St. John’s grave.

The Ephesus Tile is the most ancient of the Cathedral’s historic stones and, due to its association with the Cathedral’s patron, the most precious. Because the area around the high altar is not open to the public, visitors never see the Ephesus Tile, and even many regular congregants are unaware of its existence.

This article tells of the stone’s origins and its journey from the ancient city of Ephesus to New York City.

St. John and Ephesus

In the first century, Ephesus (now Selçuk in Izmir, Türkiye) was the fourth largest city in the Roman Empire after Rome, Alexandria, and Antioch. It was the principal city in Asia Minor (now the Anatolia region of Türkiye) and the biggest and busiest seaport in the eastern Mediterranean – a multicultural, multilingual crossroads of trade routes. 

Ephesus was the New York City of the Roman Empire – that is, New York as it was in the days when its waterfront bristled with cargo-laden wharves and bustled with longshoremen and stevedores (a living memory for this writer). The following passage from the Revelation of St. John the Divine vividly describes the sights that its author would have seen on the piers of the city’s harbor: 

… gold and silver, jewels and pearls, fine linen, silk, and scarlet, scented wood … ivory and bronze, iron and marble, cinnamon, spices, frankincense, wine, oil, fine flour, cattle and sheep, horses and chariots, and slaves, human souls. (Rev. 18:12-13).

Ephesus was the site of the Temple of Artemis, one of the seven wonders of the ancient world. Built in 340 BCE, it was one of the largest temples of antiquity, with a length of 350 feet and marble columns that soared to a height of 60 feet. (One might say it was the Cathedral of St. John the Divine of the Roman Empire.) When the apostle Paul visited Ephesus, he provoked a riot by preaching that “gods made by human hands are not gods,” thus incurring the wrath of the silversmiths who ran a brisk trade selling small shrines to temple tourists (Acts 19:23-41).

John, the author of Revelation, was almost certainly an Ephesian, by either birth or adoption. Historian Elaine Pagels suggests that he was a Judean who emigrated to Ephesus after the Romans destroyed Jerusalem in 70 CE. He was steeped in the writings of the Old Testament prophets; more than half of Revelation’s 404 verses quote or refer to them.

By his own account, John wrote Revelation while exiled by Roman authorities to the Aegean island of Patmos, about 70 miles off the coast of Ephesus. On the Cathedral’s west front, we see him gazing upward to the apocalyptic visions he experienced on Patmos, while holding his pen at the ready to record them.

John addressed Revelation to the Christian communities of seven cities in western Asia Minor, beginning with Ephesus, praising and admonishing each in turn. He was evidently a leading figure in Asia Minor’s Christian community for he appears to be personally familiar with each of the seven churches. 

At four places in Revelation, he identifies himself as John without providing any other qualifying information. From this, New Testament scholar Bruce Metzger concludes: “… it is probable that the author intends his readers to understand that he is the John, who was so well known that he needed no titles or credentials.” Given John’s apparent celebrity, it is plausible that his tomb in Ephesus would become a shrine. 

We shall leave it to the academics to hash out the question of whether the author of Revelation was the same John as “the disciple whom Jesus loved” and the author of the fourth gospel and the three Johannine epistles. In the second century, St. Justin Martyr declared that they were all one and the same person. The church has followed Justin ever since, venerating St. John in all his aspects on his feast day, December 27. Some modern scholars think otherwise, such as Raymond Brown, who probably speaks for many when he writes that Revelation was “written by a Jewish Christian prophet named John who was neither John the son of Zebedee nor the writer of the Johannine gospel or of the Epistles.”

John died in Ephesus and was buried there. Or was he? The Golden Legend, a widely-read thirteenth-century compilation of the miracles of the saints, recounts a story about the death of St. John that circulated for centuries. 

The story has it that John, at age 98, had a vision of Jesus and the apostles summoning him to heaven. The following Sunday, John gathered his followers at the church in Ephesus that had been built in his honor. There he preached his final sermon.

Then he had them dig a square grave near the altar and throw the earth outside the church. He went down into the grave and, with arms outstretched to God, said, “Lord Jesus Christ, you have called me to your feast: here I am, and I thank you for deigning to invite me to your table. You know that I have longed for you with all my heart!”  When he had said this, he was surrounded by light so brilliant that he was lost to human sight.

Giotto’s fresco imagines the moment  of John’s assumption into heaven. The artist injects a touch of gentle humor at the confusion of the onlookers – two of whom gape dumbfounded into the empty grave while another strokes his chin in bewilderment.

There is yet another narrative that the saint lying in the tomb is not dead but asleep. Clive Foss’s history of Ephesus quotes the memoir of  Jordanus Catalanus, a fourteenth-century visitor to the tomb: “… from hour to hour, a very loud sound is heard, as of a man snoring.”

The Basilica of St. John

Whether empty or occupied, the tomb of St. John has long been a destination for pilgrims. According to Foss, the tomb “was revered well before the conversion of Constantine [312 CE].” Soon after that date, a small shrine was built over the tomb. It was replaced around 450 by a much larger church three hundred feet in length with a cruciform plan of four arms radiating from the shrine of the saint. A century later, the Emperor Justinian replaced it with an even larger basilica.

 Justinian (482-565) was a prolific developer of churches, roads, bridges, and aqueducts throughout the Byzantine Empire. Istanbul’s Hagia Sophia is the best-known of the forty-eight churches commissioned by Justinian. 

The new basilica was cruciform like the previous church, but with a western arm double the length of the old one, expanded north and south arms, and an apse extended eastward. Barrel vaults and six domes replaced the peaked roof of the earlier structure – four circular domes above the crossing and the east, north, and south arms, and two elliptical domes above the extended west arm. Massive marble columns supported the domes, while the rest of the structure was mainly brick.

According to ancient historian Bettany Hughes, the basilica was built of “choice building fragments from the old Temple,” that is, the Temple of Artemis, which had been destroyed by an earthquake and a fire in 262 CE. Its marble was subsequently salvaged for other buildings.

The image above is a digital reconstruction of the basilica’s interior by Mieke Pfarr-Harfst of the Technical University of Darmstadt. Note the baldachin over the shrine and the iconostasis standing before it. According to Foss, all the interior surfaces were covered with mosaics and frescos. As you look at the digital reconstruction, try to imagine it filled with the multisensory experience of Byzantine liturgy – mosaics shimmering in the flickering light from oil lamps, chants echoing through the reverberant space, clouds of aromatic incense billowing upward to the domes. 

By the fourteenth century, the basilica had become a mosque. In the latter half of that century, earthquakes toppled the arches and domes. Beginning in the nineteenth century, extensive archaeological investigation made the site accessible for modern pilgrims and tourists. A partial reconstruction of the baldachin now designates the location of what is believed to be John’s grave.

The Ephesus Tile Arrives

How did a fragment of Justinian’s basilica (and possibly of the Temple of Artemis) wind up in New York City? For this we can thank Frederick Joseph Kinsman. 

Kinsman was an assisting priest at the Cathedral in 1905-08, years when the Cathedral was under construction with services conducted in the crypt’s bygone Tiffany Chapel. He taught at the School for Deaconesses in St. Faith’s House (now Diocesan House) and served on the building committee headed by Rev. William Reed Huntington. In that capacity, Kinsman advised sculptor Gutzon Borglum on the period-appropriate vestments for the twenty figures at the entrance to St. Columba’s Chapel. 

In the summer of 1905, Kinsman traveled to Asia Minor in what was then known as the Ottoman Empire. Kinsman’s autobiography, Salve Mater, recounts that he “spent the early days of July exploring the hills and ruins of Ephesus.” There, he encountered Austrian archaeologist Georg Weber, an authority on ancient Ephesus. 

According to correspondence recorded in the minutes of the Cathedral’s Committee on the Fabric, Weber gave Kinsman two stones from the ruins of the Basilica of St. John: the marble stone now known as the Ephesus Tile and a brick from one of the basilica’s vaulted arches. Weber marked each stone as authentic.

Kinsman donated the stones to the Cathedral in 1909. By this time, he had been consecrated as the Bishop of Delaware. He held that position until 1920 when he resigned to join the Roman Catholic Church. His autobiography details the reasons for his conversion. He spent the rest of his career teaching church history at Catholic University of America.

Huntington wrote the inscription for the stone. According to Kinsman’s account: “The drafting of an inscription for this was the last work done by Dr. Huntington for the Cathedral. He dictated a letter to me about it the day before his death.”

Christians of all major communions – Roman, Protestant, Anglican, Orthodox – still visit the tomb of St. John and the ruins of ancient Ephesus. How fitting that a fragment of that sacred site should now reside in a cathedral that ministers to the multicultural, multilingual crossroads that is New York City.

Sincere thanks to diocesan archivist Wayne Kempton for access to the papers of the Committee on the Fabric.

■

Sources:

Brown, Raymond E., An Introduction to the New Testament (New York: Doubleday, 1997) ● Cathedral of St. John the Divine, Committee on the Fabric, Minutes, March 22, 1909. ● Foss, Clive, Ephesus after Antiquity: A Late Antique, Byzantine and Turkish City (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979) ● Hughes, Bettany, The Seven Wonders of the Ancient World (New York: Vintage Books, 2024) ● Kinsman, Frederick Joseph, Salve Mater (New York: Longmans, Green & Co., 1922) ● Krautheimer, Richard, Early Christian and Byzantine Architecture, 4^th ed. (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1986) ● Metzger, Bruce M., Breaking the Code: Understanding the Book of Revelation (Nashville, TN: Abingdon Press, 1993) ● Pagels, Elaine, Revelations: Visions, Prophecy, & Politics in the Book of Revelation (New York: Viking, 2012) ● Procopius, Buildings (Loeb Classical Library), H.B. Dewing, translator (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1940) ● Voragine, Jacobus de, The Golden Legend, Christopher Stace, translator (New York: Penguin Books, 1998).

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.”

■

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